Starring: Danielle Mason, Florence Mulheron, Olivia Violet Robinson, Tim Spite, Phil Vaughan and Anthony Young.

21 January − 18 February

Extra Matinee added due to Sold Out Season : Saturday 18 February 4pm

Tue & Wed 6.30pm

Thu to Sat 8.00pm

Sun 4.00pm

$46 Adults

$38 Students, senior citizens and beneficiaries

$33 Friends of Circa (until Thu 2 Feb)

$25 Preview night (Fri 20 Jan)

$25 Special Sunday (Sun 22 Jan)

$39 Groups 6+

$33 Groups 20+

$25 Student/Equity stand-by

$25 Under 25s (Contains Adult Themes and Languauge - please call the Box Office on 801-7992 if you would like to check age suitability)

The Motor Camp

Reviewed by Laurie Atkinson

The Dominion Post - 25 January 2011

Someone had to do it eventually. Just about every Kiwi pastime and institution have been the wellspring of popular comedies: the Public Service, shearing gangs, education, OEs, tramping, race relations, sports, reading groups, retirement homes and the Plunket Society.
And now motor camps in Dave Armstrong's lively look at Kiwis on holiday in The Motor Camp, which I predict will soon be performed all over the country so long as theatres have stages large enough to accommodate two caravans.
Holidays can bring families closer together and they can drive them apart. In The Motor Camp the home truths revealed in the hectic climax involving the two neighbouring camping families are such that one would have thought divorce would be inevitable. However, being a comedy, within a matter of about eight minutes all ends happily.
And being a comedy one has to ignore the likelihood of a curmudgeonly academic, Frank Redmond, trying to finish his thesis on the teaching of phonics in the bustle of a motor camp and that his youngish wife, Jude, is the Dean of the Arts Faculty at Vic. However, their sullen fifteen year-old daughter Holly who wants to be with her boyfriend at The Mount, is all too amusingly real.
In the neighbouring caravan are typical Kiwi bloke Mike Hislop and his Maori wife Dawn and her seventeen year-old son Jared. And being a Kiwi Comedy of Manners, the rules of which are nearly as rigid as those governing Restoration Comedy of Manners, much of the humour arises in the conflict between the Left and the Right, the sporty, DIY, bigoted contractor and the clumsy, inadequate academic, and of course there's sex which drives the plot and causes the explosive revelations.
The senior members of Danny Mulheron's cast go to it with their familiar, well-honed comedy skills in top-notch condition. As Frank, Tim Spite spends most of the time in a Basil Fawlty-like fury at just about everything until he has a scene with Jared which is both hilarious and touching at the same time, and quite the cleverest and best written scene in the play.
As Jude, Danielle Mason is the epitome of common-sense until she's given a large fish, while Phil Vaughan as Mike (though at times seemingly mumbling through his moustache) is all bluster and vulgarity but a good bloke underneath. In an under-written part, Olivia Violet Robinson gives Dawn a warmth lacking in the other characters.
As the teenagers Florence Mulheron and Anthony Young, both scions of highly respected theatrical parents, show that they have talent to burn too. Mulheron's Holly reading her boyfriend's text message and Young's mooching, off-hand manner for most of the play are true and funny.
And I shouldn't forget to mention Cees Ebskamp who is the voice of the “Dutch fascist” who runs the camp and is heard over the loud speakers issuing side-splitting orders such as the maximum weight of children allowed on the trampoline.