Theatre Posh

Playwright: Laura Wade
Director: Lyndsey Turner
Royal Court,
London SW1
(020-7565 5000)
Running time:
2hrs 45mins


It looks suspiciously as if the Royal Court "is doing its darndest to sabotage the Conservatives' election campaign", said Kate Bassett in The Independent on Sunday. Laura Wade's new play is a fictionalised group portrait of a dining club for rich, well-born Oxford undergraduates. And although she calls it the Riot Club, it's clearly modelled on the Bullingdon, past members of which include David Cameron, George Osborne and Boris
nson. Wade's group of nine young toffs descend on a country gastropub - where they repair to a private dining room, sing the National Anthem,



propose endless toasts to long-dead members and, since leaving the room is strictly forbidden, throw up into sick bags. One of them has hired a prostitute for the evening, and there are also unpleasant encounters with the landlord and his less than willing daughter. It's "hair-raising" how "coarsely bigoted" the club members appear behind closed doors, and the revelation of their "hidden brutality" is reminiscent of Patrick Hamilton's classic 1920s thriller Rope.
The play is "undoubtedly entertaining", said Charles Spencer in The Daily Telegraph, "though I can't imagine David Cameron will enjoy it much". Wade "persuasively captures that off-putting sense of entitlement that so


often emanates from those who have been to leading public schools". She also illuminates the w'it and intelligence of the characters, as well as "their revolting snobbery, condescension, cruelty and violence". Less persuasive is the "paranoid conspiracy theory" peddled by the play: that members of such gentlemen's clubs secretly run the country.
Posh is a "throwback" to the era of open class war, agreed Benedict Nightingale in The Times. Without giving too much away about the ending, I doubt that Cameron and Osborne

have often "half-killed landlords, assaulted their daughters, lied about such offences and let that near-mythic figure, the Tory grandee, arrange a cover-up". Though "lively, watchable and funny". Posh is also extremely "dated".