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.