The Motor Camp at Circa TheatreTwo fam­i­lies take their car­a­vans to The Wind­mill Motor Camp for the sum­mer hol­i­days. Uni­ver­si­ty lec­tur­ers, Frank (Tim Spite) and Jude (Danielle Mason) Red­mond, along with their daugh­ter Hol­ly (Flo­rence Mul­heron) set up next to build­ing con­trac­tor Mike His­lop (Phil Vaugh­an), his wife (?) Dawn Tairoa (Olivia Vio­let Robin­son) and her son Jared (Antony Young). Frank is focused on writ­ing a book so he does­n’t lose his job, Jude wants to relax and read her book, Hol­ly is gut­ted she is not with her friends, Mike helps out at the camp in between fish­ing trips, Dawn is enjoy­ing ‘cook­ing’ despite wor­ry­ing about the busi­ness, and Jared is doing what­ev­er young men do while camp­ing with their par­ents.

There are plen­ty of ref­er­ences to sex in this play. Get­ting it, not get­ting it, euphemisms for it, prac­ti­cal appli­ca­tions of descrip­tions of it and so forth. (The set car­a­vans are pret­ty stur­dy!) Spite and Vaugh­an play their roles broad­ly while the rest of the cast is more restrained. The audi­ence (an ear­ly Wednes­day night crowd) found it hys­ter­i­cal and were laugh­ing uproar­i­ous­ly from the start.

There’s some clever writ­ing but ulti­mate­ly it did­n’t work for me. I want­ed more con­trast between words and actions, and some kind of ret­ribu­tive pay off for char­ac­ter atti­tudes in the first half. I’m not sure whether it’s an issue that comes from the script or the direc­tion but some­thing just did­n’t work for me.

  • The return sea­son of The Motor Camp on at Cir­ca The­atre to 18 Feb­ru­ary.