Posh

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Posh previewed 11 May 2012, opened 23 May 2012, closed 4 August 2012 at the Duke of York's Theatre in London.

The Royal Court Theatre presents Laura Wade's play Posh in London with Simon Shepherd and directed by Lyndsey Turner.

In an oak-panelled room in Oxford, ten young bloods with cut-glass vowels and deep pockets are meeting, intent on restoring their right to rule. Members of an elite student dining society, the boys are bunkering down for a wild night of debauchery, decadence and bloody good wine. But this isn’t the last huzzah: they’re planning a takeover - Welcome to the Riot Club.

The cast for Posh in London at the Duke of York's Theatre features Simon Shepherd along with with Leo Bill, Jolyon Coy, Richard Goulding, Henry Lloyd-Hughes, Charlotte Lucas, Joshua McGuire, Tom Mison who are all reprising their roles from the original 2010 Royal Court Theatre production. They are joined by Edward Killingback, Harry Lister Smith, Jessica Ransom and Steffan Rhodri. The production is directed by Lyndsey Turner with designs by Anthony Ward, lighting by Charles Balfour, sound by David McSeveney and music by James Fortune. Laura Wade's play Posh was previously seen at The Royal Court Theatre in London where it run from 9 April 2010 to 22 May 2010.

Please Note: Age guidance 14 plus.

While there are obvious parallels in Posh between the fictional 'Riot Club' and the notorious 'Bullingdon Club' in Oxford which counted among its members David Cameron, George Osborne and Boris Johnson, Laura Wade, the writer of Posh says that the 'Riot Club' "is a fictional club and it exists in a world of metaphor. The play was never seeking to be a documentary about those individuals. The play is set now, and they were at Oxford in the Eighties, and the Bullingdon is a different club to the one in the play... I was drawn to the idea of creating a club from scratch, rather than trying to replicate real-life events. So we get a room, 10 boys, a lot of alcohol and food, a certain amount of ambition, intelligence and charm and we see what happens when you put all that in the oven for a few hours. I felt it was important that this wasn't just an opportunity to sit and watch a lot of rotters. They're smart and charming, and I wanted us to enjoy being in there with them and for us still to be there when things get much darker so that to some extent we are then implicated."

"Posh chronicles an evening in one of those Cotswold foodie pubs by 10 young members of the Riot Club, a thinly-disguised Bullingdon. The broad idea is for them to have dinner, drink an ocean of good claret, get hog-whimperingly drunk, be sick and then trash the room. Money being no object, they pay for the damage... The play tends to drag, is at times tediously repetitive, despite some good jokes. If the object of this basically flimsy play was class warfare, it failed if the hooting, distinctly upper-class laughter of the audience was a yardstick." The Daily Express

"There are major political and cultural issues at stake here, and I find the malign connections Laura Wade draws rather glib and melodramatic, but as to the quality of the writing, performances and direction by Lyndsey Turner there is no doubt. Wade, a comprehensive school girl from Sheffield, has pulled off an extraordinary feat of ventriloquism. There is nothing parodic about the dialogue; she writes as public schoolboys speak when they meet as a pack. The ironic humour, playground rudeness and braying bravado of their argot comes in wave after wave, as if Wade had just opened the floodgates of language and stood aside. I see this as a companion piece to the Court's recent production of Jerusalem, Jez Butterworth's dystopian vision of modern rural england.As with Jerusalem, the play is teeming with life and all its contradictions; hard questions are put, but answers remain tantalisingly elusive." The Sunday Telegraph

"Laura Wade deftly catches the unmistakable sound of braying hoorays; the sneering, the swearing, the snobbery and the vocabulary... Better still, she captures their gobsmacking sense of entitlement and tribalism... The trouble is, while doubtless authentic (Wade did masses of research), neither the characters nor the plot are quite believable. Wouldn't at least one of these chaps have been a tiny bit moral, or a tad sophisticated; vaguely civilised and possibly clever? In Lyndsey Turner's well acted production, this lot are all as nauseating as each other: stupid, unthinking, just more or less hogwhimperingly drunk. Revoltingly amusing, but a cartoon rather than a satire with real bite, which goes nowhere new." The Mail on Sunday

"We know it's not the Bullingdon. But Laura Wade's fictional Riot Club looks very like it. Posh puts on stage 10 gleaming male faces, their self-esteem barely held in by their perfect skin, their chests double-barrelling out under waistcoats. It sounds like it, too: loud and loaded. And some of its habits are, well, similar: each diner sits down to eat with a bin bag at the ready so that he can throw up easily... Wade gives her cast an abrasive, expletive-laden lingo, studded with catchphrases and the occasional canny coinage... Anthony Ward's clever design shows a pub dining room hung with antlers and landscapes, striving for draughty country-house grandeur. Lyndsey Turner's punchy production intercuts scenes with a capella versions of hip-hop, rock and grime numbers, arranged by the musical director James Fortune." The Observer

Posh in London at the Duke of York's Theatre previews from 11 May 2012, opens on 23 May 2012 and closes on 4 August 2012.