Caravan in rehearsalHannah Taylor

“Come in!”, sing-songs a grinning Amelia Oakley, ushering me into the ADC before flopping, exhausted, onto the stage. On top of the usual week one tiredness and to-do lists, her head is full of 90s playlists, Liverpudlian accents and instructions for building mobile homes. This is not, as far as I’m aware, due to a penchant for particularly niche hobbies – or, at least, only as odd as you deem theatre to be. These ponderings (plus, I’m told, a “very educational” Ken Loach documentary) are all part of her preparation for Caravan, the week two ADC show which she, assisted by Clara van Wel, is directing. 

Caravan, the pair immediately set out, “is not like much we have seen before on the ADC”. Helen Blakeman’s award-winning drama follows the “complicated, messy, small lives” of one working-class Liverpudlian family, holidaying in their caravan in North Wales. It’s “a bit like a soap opera”, suggests Sophie Taylor, who plays 15-year-old daughter, Kim.

Amelia agrees: “It follows two people for two years, but we pop in at choice moments in their lives, generally when they are on the brink of disaster or revelation. You get this very domestic overview of the family, but like a soap opera all the dramatic shit happens a lot more regularly than it might in real life.”

The claustrophobic caravan’s backdrop, explains Clara, is Liverpool’s dockers’ strikes. “We’ve contained this big political event to its effects within a very small family... Even the idea of doing northern accents is quite a rare thing here, because it’s such a southern-dominated theatre”.

From an actor’s perspective, however, “you’re never asked to always like these characters”. Sophie muses that “as the story unravels you’re not going to sympathise with who you might expect to”.

“The challenge right now is that we want it to be domestic, but rehearsing it without the caravan is very hard”. Clara nods: “So much of it is about living in the space, and the actors feeling like it’s their own”. With an enormous, immovable home to root into the theatre, their Sunday-Monday get-in is going to be no easy task. “Maybe we should cook dinner and eat it the caravan that night?” muses the director. “Yes!” cries Clara, “Chips in the caravan! All we need now is for it to rain indoors and the ADC is basically Wales”.

Caravan will bring something unique to ADC stage – and not just the massive, fully inhabitable caravan that will be built onstage by their “lovely” Technical Director, Toby Molyneux. “There’s a weird hierarchy to Cambridge theatre which I just don’t understand”, explains Amelia, “that says there is a ‘Corpus show’ – which is smaller, quirkier, a little rough round the edges, and there’s an ‘ADC show’, which is always a massive showstopper”.

“I think what we’ve done is brought something that would traditionally be a Corpus show onto the ADC. It’s not a ‘showstopper’. It’s just a really good show: the set will be impressive, the performances will be impressive, there’s just no singing and dancing”. She smiles with a prenatal fondness for the play, just two weeks from being born onto this very stage – one which for her clearly feels a lot like home already, caravan or not.

“Hang on”, pipes up Clara, in a gently disgusted dead-pan, “there’s not going be any singing or dancing?” At this, Amelia, previously lost in thought, corpses. “Okay”, she smirks, “maybe a bit of dancing! Those 90s hits are bangers”. And their laughter drifts out into the sea of velvet seats, which in but a few weeks they will be filling. 

Caravan begins its run at the ADC on 18th OctoberPlease note that the play contains sexual assault, child abuse, family conflict and miscarriage.