It is written by Dave Armstrong, television writer and playwright, whose Le Sud had extra performances to meet the demand for tickets at last year's Otago Festival of the Arts.
The Tutor won best new New Zealand play at the 2005 Chapman Tripp Theatre Awards and has been staged at Centrepoint in Palmerston North and at the Court in Christchurch.
It is a satire holding up right and left political views against each other, Davies says.
"You can't come to this play and totally think the other guy is wrong, but you will laugh at both positions in a cool way. We think we have a multi-party system, but it's basically the same party just with different poles and the satire comes from laughing at people who think one side is totally right."
Although the play was written when the Labour Party was in government, it has been updated both politically and technologically to suit an election year, he says.
"Basically, the self-made millionaire dad wants his son to succeed at school, so he gets a tutor in and their ideologies of how you make things work in New Zealand are at odds.
It's a microcosm for what New Zealand is and what Labour and National are doing, but up-front it's a comedy.
"Some of the language may make you slightly blush, but it's what they say on the farm."
John Sellers (played by Phil Vaughan) is a flashy businessman who thinks money is the answer to everything. His son Nathan (Jake Metzger) uses this to his advantage as he gets expelled from several schools and goes through numerous tutors.
Then along comes the tutor Richard Holton (Jon Pheloung), who sits at the other end of the political spectrum from Sellers, but all is not what it seems, according to Davies.
"There are four or five revelations that make you rethink what people are saying. No-one's what they seem in this play - everyone has a hidden agenda. It's a great play for going 'so that's why he did that. I didn't know that before - sneaky'."
Davies (46), originally from Dunedin, has been working around the country and overseas as an actor and director. After The Tutor, he is directing Glorious, by Richard Huber at Bats in Wellington, then he goes to Hamilton to act in Roger Hall's Middle Age Spread. He loves the ups and downs of the itinerant life of a theatre practitioner, despite the often stringent conditions in which he works.
"It's almost in spite of lack of funding. I've just been turned down for [funding for] Glorious, so we've had a rethink.
"Part of the challenge in a recession is to make art out of nothing. And necessity's the mother of invention, even in a state-funded theatre like the Fortune.
"There's never the funding to enable it to reach peak revs, but we will aim for that and aim to bring vitality and life and colour and make it different and exciting."
Although Glorious has not received funding, Davies has decided to put his own money behind it - he would have had to add to a grant anyway, he says.
It will cost $24,000 to stage - mostly paying the artists - but although you can negotiate a lower rate, you can't not pay professionals to do their job, just as you wouldn't not pay a plumber, he says.
"It's like mums in war - you use what rations you have in the best way possible and you use every part of the cow."
In a dangerous way that is interesting, because it means paring back to the essentials, he says.
"Sometimes that's good, but there's so much expectation to look good and be good, and you want to do it so badly and it's something you'd like to show people.
"We don't do it for ourselves, we do it to communicate with people," he says.
"Theatre is such an enjoyable live moment and you can make it work because the audience uses its imagination.
You take the audience in and you share something and put them on the same rollercoaster you are on and say 'follow me' and let go the brakes.
"It's great with a comedy, because it's so easy and once they start laughing and getting into it and then half your work is done with a good script. The Tutor is like that."
Davies has enjoying working with the skilled Fortune team - he doesn't have to find the money as he would for his own productions, he just has to make it work, he says.
Catch it
The Tutor, by David Armstrong and directed by Patrick Davies, opens at the Fortune Theatre on July 8 and runs until July 30. It features Phil Vaughan, Jon Pheloung and Jake Metzger.
