Campervan is an explosively campy horror-comedy musical written by Melbourne’s own cabaret queen Geraldine Quinn. The show’s tongue-in-cheek blend of powerhouse vocal performances, Australiana aesthetics and tender moments of gen X wistfulness makes Campervan one of the most touching comedies I’ve seen in theatre.

Geraldine Quinn opens the play with aplomb, playing her cameo role of commanding club hostess who demands, through the form of thundering song, that we sign in. The harshly overlit and heinously carpeted club interior projected behind Quinn unambiguously asserts the chilling setting: Australia.

We’re soon introduced to the main cast of four old friends, who after drifting apart over the years, reunite at the club to pay tribute to their mate Disco—who was murdered while they were filming a camcorder slasher horror on their camping trip a decade ago. After reminiscing over Disco—that is, after singing about how much of an asshole he was—the quartet decide to use the upcoming long weekend to camp in the Victoria bush and finish their film project which the dismemberment of their friend so gorily interrupted. 

I have so much praise for this musical, but the thing that I’m sure most audience members will remember it for is how downright funny it was. Sure, a large chunk of the humour relies on the comedy inherent in Gen X remembering their bong-hitting no-fucks-given bender-having glory days and trying clumsily to recreate them, exemplified by a character getting blasted to another cosmic realm through a minute-long bucket bong hit that was sonically broadcasted through the Trades Hall. But there are also absurdly funny one-liners, too—I particularly enjoyed the iNaturalist reference—and an undeniable facetiousness baked into the absurdity of the slasher plotline. 

This comedy was only enhanced by the characters, each of whom was uniquely situated between the stereotypical, the absurd and the complexly human. One of the friends was an alien-obsessed conspiracy theorist, another a nature-loving iNaturalist user. Nestled amongst these hyperbolised stereotypes, though, was some surprisingly resonant character depth: the two lead women, childhood friends, sung candidly of unfulfilled potential and abandoned dreams. In the campy framework of a slasher comedy, surrounded by hyperbolised, typical characters, these two leads had tastefully tender characterisation. I’d like to give credit to the actors for pulling this off and balancing the over-the-top qualities inherent in the script with genuine affect and authenticity. This, on top of some soaring vocal performances.

I also enjoyed how Aussie this musical felt, in a way that was similarly post-ironic, both piss-take and love letter. The nature-loving character sang an ode to the Aussie bush, taking a break from singing to hit out a body percussion solo—him whacking the bugs bothering his various body parts. The cast sung with what felt like a slightly broadened Aussie accent. Toorak and Dingley Village were namedropped, and Harold Holdt’s disappearance was blamed on the aliens. The play’s relationship with its Australian setting came across like banter—maybe mean on the surface, but certainly coming from a place of love. This was the right tone to strike given both the play’s contents and the current political climate, where being too passionately patriotic is, to put it lightly, suspect.

I feel obliged to acknowledge here that I—as a 23-year-old—am certainly not the target audience for this musical that’s reminiscing about the life I am currently living. Whilst I didn’t connect to the play from a sense of nostalgia, it was still, for me at least, an invocation to strongarm life, to make the memories Quinn is procuring nostalgic for, all while hopefully avoiding dismemberment. Maybe not the takeaway Quinn had in mind, but I like to think she would approve of it.

Campervan balances the sincere complexity of human relationships with killer characters and a campy slasher-crime twist. It cleverly uses the aesthetics of the unserious and the absurd to tap into someplace deeper, smuggling the nostalgic reminiscence of dazed Gen X camping trips into an audacious, rapturous musical.