Charmian Smith talks to director Conrad Newport about the funny side of camping.
Conrad Newport treats comedy like a piece of music - it's all about timing and placing on stage, the Wellington-based director says.
He is directing Dave Armstrong's comedy, The Motor Camp, which opens at the Fortune Theatre on Saturday.
"I think good comics are always musical people. They always have a good ear for music because it's all about the rhythm of the piece," he said.
"In drama you slow down and have meaningful pauses. Comedy is always much faster paced so you have to really wrangle those actors on stage and keep it flowing."
The play is set in a typical New Zealand motor camp on the coast somewhere south of here.
It's the sort of place every New Zealander knows about - families in their tents or caravans in close proximity and everyone trying to have a good time, whatever their neighbours are like.
In The Motor Camp, playwright Dave Armstrong juxtaposes two families with completely different outlooks and values, and their two hormonal teenagers whom they try to keep apart.
That, along with typical camping problems such as struggling to put up an awning, make for the comedy, he said.
"At the top we see an ostensibly unhappy squabbling academic family with their spoiled daughter who goes to a private school somewhere in Dunedin and has everything laid on. They are squabbling the second they come on stage because they hate it, just knowing it's going to be awful like every year."
The husband drags his family to a motor camp for their annual holiday because of his socialist principles. But this year he plans to work on his thesis instead of spending family time, which annoys his wife, a more successful academic than him.
It goes from bad to worse, Newport said with a laugh.
Camping next to them is a family who appear to be having a good time. They own a building contracting firm, but have been affected by the economic downturn and had to sell their house in Wanaka and their flash boat.
They are reduced to holidaying in a motor camp and are a bit ashamed as it's not the mark of a successful person.
The builder heavily disciplines his stepson, a typically rebellious teenager.
His wife and stepson are Maori, which introduces another source of conflict, because as soon as the children meet you know they are going to go off down to the beach to have high jinks, Newport said.
"The socialist family, who know the language and the correct protocol and things like that are challenged by their daughter going out with a Maori boy. It's all good on paper, but they are uncomfortable with it."
Some of The Motor Camp's themes are similar to those in Armstrong's The Tutor, which the Fortune staged last year: a liberal socialist and a redneck businessman come face to face, but this time we meet the rest of the families, he said.
The play premiered in Wellington late last year and is being staged around the country. Newport was in two minds whether to see the Wellington production as he wanted to keep the script fresh and new, but eventually decided to go to see what not to do and what did not work, he said.
"I had leave from the writer, because we had worked so much together, to take stuff out and alter it, which is important. It's lucky we have a great working relationship because some playwrights won't change anything. It's sort of shooting yourself in the foot, I think.
"I'm a firm believer that whatever actor you have in the role, they have a certain rhythm - to go back to the music analogy. Very often, because of the workshopping process and the work from the first production, it comes from the original actor. If it doesn't quite fit, you just tweak the line, swap a word, change things around, with the same intention but just with a different rhythm."
The public doesn't realise that a lot of the details in a script come from the rehearsal floor on an original production, he says.
"People think it's just the writer at home making it up, which of course it sometimes is, but then you have to refine it and have a play with it."
Newport, a dramaturg (script adviser) as well as a director, has worked with Armstrong on several of his new plays.
"It's my passion, helping them get ready for potential production," he said.
"Some writers create the most impossible set-ups and sometimes that's fun because you have to work really hard to try and make them happen on stage, but you'll get magic out of it because it's theatre, not real life, and in a real space."
Although movies have changed the nature of theatre, he believes that when you see an actor doing "really small stuff - as small as you can do in a theatre where you have to project", it still beats what can happen in a movie.
"You are in a real time and real space and it's still incredibly viable and exciting. I think you can't top that emotionally," he said.
See it
The Motor Camp by Dave Armstrong, directed by Conrad Newport, opens at the Fortune Theatre on Saturday, February 18. It features Nadya Shaw Bennet, Patrick Davies, Joe Dekkers-Reihana, Claire Dougan, Kim Garrett and Jonathan Hodge.
