Posh

Photographer: Richard Lakos

This superb new staging of Laura Wade’s 2010 Royal Court play Posh is deliberately timed to provoke debate ahead of this year’s general election. Will the nation allow Cameron and his Oxbridge friends to stay in office or elect another government made up of...people from the same universities and background? Either way, the Establishment remains the Establishment and the country stays in the control of a rich, privileged boys club like the one portrayed in all its silly, sinister antics here.

Although based on Oxford University’s exclusive Bullingdon Club you won’t find thinly veiled versions of David Cameron, Boris Johnson and George Osborne in Wade’s Riot Club. Instead there are ten Oxford undergraduates, all white, rich, confident, boorish, foul-mouthed and potential leaders of the future, getting together in a country gastropub to revive the riotous club dinners of old which have become family legends. The assumptions of cultural superiority are established in the first few lines of dialogue when young Guy Bellingfield seeks advice about the dinner from his great uncle Jeremy, a peer who helped pull several chandeliers down in the Riot Club’s glory days. Guy tells him he’s seeing a girl. “What do her parents do?” “They own a chain of shops.” “Selling what?” “Magazines and newspapers.” “The kind of place where you pop out for a pint of milk. I bet she goes like the clappers.” Guy gulps his whisky.

Yet, despite their wealth, the Riot Club members can’t prevent the modern world from disappointing their expectations. For one thing, the grotesque main course isn’t cooked right. Then there’s no cocaine because the dimmest one among them got mugged on a housing estate when he told a vagrant that he didn’t have any change, just notes. Worse still, the call girl they’ve booked for dessert (“Gentlemen, it’s cock-o-clock”) won’t go under the table for them. And the landlord insists that they don’t smoke and keep the noise down. With gallons of the finest wines already imbibed, the scene is primed for an explosion of anger against all that the young and rich detest - the poor and the middle class.
 

Photographer: Richard Lakos

For while Posh is chiefly a horror show about a privileged set it is also a study of the never ending British fixation with definitions of class and social hierarchy. As the Riot Club’s most angry member sneers, it’s families like their’s who built the country while the middle class are people who think they’re a cut above “because they eat asparagus and pretend not to be racist.” West Bridgford came to mind at this point. Yet while the Riot Club’s little boys can certainly be funny, clever and charming on one level, Wade is determined to make us dislike them from the start. Even before the first scene with Guy Bellingham was finished the man seated behind me whispered to his partner that he already hated him. Ultimately, Posh doesn’t present an argument about Them and Us, rather that the kind of people who get into the Riot Club should be regarded as a separate species of human being. This is a play designed to produce strong feelings.

Directed by Susannah Tresilian, it is also acted by a young cast who get it spot on in their actions, demeanour and penetrating, braying accents. In an ensemble performance it is unfair to pick out a single name for praise but recognition must go to designer Ellan Parry for the bright, queasy dinner party room and the simple, elegant set design which begins and ends the play. Credit also to Joanne Evans, the lady in the bright red dress who provides operatic interludes. She’s a class act, yah?

Posh is at Nottingham Playhouse until Saturday 28 February.

Nottingham Playhouse website