Royalcourttheatre.com

Posh (at the Duke of York's Theatre)

2012-03-14

Fri 11 May - Sat 4 August 2012

£52.50, £45.00, £35.00, £25.00, £15.00. Premiums £75.00

Production Company: Royal Court Theatre Productions and Ambassador Theatre Group Present the Royal Court Theatre production of

Playwright: by Laura Wade

Lead Quote: 'I've got a new law for you mate, it's called survival of the fittest, it's called fxxx you we're the Riot Club.'

Reviews: ****
,??The Guardian by Michael Billington, 24 May 2012??
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,With even a Tory attacking the "arrogant, posh boys" who run her party, now seems a good time to revive Laura Wade's 2010 play.
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,It has undergone a good deal of revision since its Royal Court premiere, necessarily acknowledging that we now have a coalition government. If I enjoyed it more second time around, it's partly because Wade has grasped a fundamental truth about British life and partly because the play breathes more easily in front of a mixed West End audience.
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,The core of the piece remains unchanged. It's all about men behaving badly: in this case an elite Oxford dining group, the Riot Club, who meet in a rural gastropub with the principal aim of getting totally smashed – "chateaued", as they call it – and trashing the premises.
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,But tempers fray when they discover the 10-bird roast on which they are dining is a guinea-fowl short and when a prostitute they've hired is arbitrarily banished.
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,What is new is the bubbling resentment they feel that, even with their chaps in power, the country is still dogged by Labour's economic inheritance: even the Tory grandee, who bookends the play by meeting first an aspiring and then a disgraced Rioter in his London club, bemoans the fact that the government is identified by the cuts it is forced to impose.
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,I still feel the extreme violence that we see in the second act is a bit forced, as if The Lord of the Flies has suddenly entered the world of Evelyn Waugh. And I wish Wade had made the still small voice of conscience, chiefly represented by the club's president, a bit stronger. But, on a second viewing, it becomes clear that Wade's chief target is not just privileged toffs but the cosy network that really runs Britain.
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,I was reminded of a famous essay Henry Fairlie wrote in the Spectator in 1955, when he coined the term "the establishment", defining it as "the matrix of official and social relations within which power in Britain is exercised".
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,The names may have changed, as life in Chipping Norton shows, but that remains essentially true today. And watching the climactic scene of Wade's play, in which the most destructive of the diners is offered a fast track to political promotion, I got a vivid sense of the masonic intimacy that still characterises British life.
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,With eight of the original cast returning, Lyndsey Turner's production retains its buoyancy and precision. Leo Bill as the most politically venomous diner, Joshua McGuire as a bouncy aspirant to the club presidency and Henry Lloyd-Hughes as a patronised Greek are as good as before. Among the newcomers, Harry Lister Smith as a mop-haired initiate and Steffan Rhodri as the pub's browbeaten owner also impress.
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,But, while Wade's play reminds us that many of the upper-class continue to enjoy the sound of broken glass, its success lies in harpooning the way power operates through a succession of nods and winks in our supposedly open, egalitarian society.
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,****
,??TimeOut by Caroline McGinn, 24 May 2012??
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,White male public school boys dominate our cabinet. And 'arrogant posh boys', to borrow one Tory backbencher's infamous description of her masters, have hit the headlines recently. So the West End transfer of Laura Wade's Royal Court hit 'Posh', which admits you to one ultra-depraved night in the company of the Oxford University 'Riot Club', is bound to hit an already-jangling nerve.
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,Its topicality is one reason why this spectacularly supercilious black comedy - featuring ten of the best young actors we've seen onstage since 'The History Boys' - has been misrepresented, as if it sits in po-faced, prejudiced judgment on the rich and the ruling classes. Dramas are forever taking vicarious peeks at stabby estate gangs (still trending post-riots) or ugly rows around the kitchen sink. Wade's more original play merely turns the tables and shows ten of the country's most eligible bachelors getting 'chateaued' on fine wine at their annual blowout. In the main, it's a blast - despite being served up with a somewhat over-egged chaser in which the vilest of the boys is rewarded with a fast track into the Tory Party for actions that would forever debar him from a role in our media-conscious public life.
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,Alistair, an angry young lizard played with positively antediluvian malice by the excellent Leo Bill, is the only real villain of this piece. He rants about why he is 'sick to f***ing death of poor people' and incites his blotto peers to treat the landlord of the pub in which they're dining (a nicely understated Steffan Rhodri) with medieval contempt. The central hypocrisy - that Alistair expects to be able to pay to commit vandalism beyond the wildest dreams of the trainer-nicking rioters he despises - is pushed to a compellingly dark conclusion in the second half. But until that point, the boys' piss-taking, piss-drinking pranks - including a naÔve attempt to convince a 'Prozzer' to suck them all off under the table - are disgracefully enjoyable.
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,Wade's play attacks the rigidly conservative Old Boy Network, but it doesn't lack compassion for conservatives. There are 9 nuanced types on stage here and First Class honours go Harry Lister Smith as a radiant try-hard new boy; Richard Goulding, fundamentally decent as the gentleman farmer who'd rather be drinking ale with the chaps in the bar; and Joshua McGuire, downwardly mobile and embarrassingly desperate to revive the ten-bird roasts and chandelier-smashing glories of the Club's past. Collectively they're narcissistic, whooping, hedonistic, arrogant young twerps who'll jizz all over anything, especially a neophyte's textbooks. But that's wasted youth for you.
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,Wade and Turner bring the culture clash between the group's traditional values and modern Britain to life. In street-focused popular culture, it's agonisingly difficult to be posh and cool. Wade's cringe-inducingly matey group slang makes that point. And Turner's astonishing, upscaled production picks it up and runs with it: the bewigged, full-sized eighteenth century portraits which spring out of their frames and start rapping are a fantastic coup de theatre. Surreal moments, when the rakish spirit of Lord Riot appears and disdains his plastered modern imitators, or when the gold-waistcoated group breaks out into impressively harmonised, brilliantly inappropriate R&B routines, make this production far more fun than the Bullingdon Club documentary that some people want it to be.
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,****
,??Telegraph by Charles Spencer, 24 May 2012??
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,If they had any time to take an interest in the theatre, David Cameron and George Osborne might just get the paranoid impression that the dramatist Laura Wade is stalking them.
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,Her play Posh, about an Oxford dining club closely resembling the Bullingdon, of which they were both members, first opened at the Royal Court during the 2010 general election campaign, a good old-fashioned piece of theatrical class-warfare determined to show ruling-class toffs in the worst possible light.
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,Now with a few updates, to take note of the fact that the Tories are now back in power, albeit in an increasingly strained coalition, it has finally arrived in the West End.
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,How Miss Wade and the producers must have rubbed their hands with glee when the rebel Tory MP Nadine Dorries described the PM and his Chancellor as “arrogant posh boys” out of touch with the lives of ordinary people. For that is exactly the point this blackly comic and often disgracefully entertaining drama strives to make.
,Posh depicts a dinner of the so-called Riot Club in an Oxfordshire gastropub getting disastrously out of hand as the booze flows and tempers fray. Wade is at pains to show the revolting sense of entitlement of these arrogant undergraduates and the hatred of at least some of the members for those less advantaged than themselves.
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,“I am sick to f***ing death of poor people,” the vilest of this drunken bunch proclaims. Needless to say by the end of the play it is this character that seems assured of a bright future in the Conservative Party thanks to an establishment cover-up.
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,But you don’t have to go along with Wade’s paranoid lefty politics to enjoy the piece. It was the fiercely reactionary Evelyn Waugh after all who memorably described “the sound of English county families baying for broken glass” in his great novel Decline and Fall.
,And there is much fun to be had at the expense of these posh characters as they bicker, get wasted and lament the awfulness of the working classes.
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,As the evening progresses, however, the mood turns increasingly dark and more violent, for Wade wants to show that there is a strain of evil in at least some of the characters, she depicts, and moral cowardice, too. And I suspect we are expected to draw the conclusion that the damage the club members inflict on the pub and its employees precisely mirrors the damage the Tories are now doing to Britain with their cuts and their austerity programme.
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,That strikes me as jejune, but there is no denying the energy of the writing and the wit and power of Lyndsay Turner’s production, which finds the cast singing close harmony versions of rap and R&B numbers as well as acting with plummy panache.
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,There are strong performances from the whole cast, with Leo Bill especially vile and weasel-like as the most extreme of the members, and Richard Goulding genuinely touching as an old fashioned one-nation Tory.
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,If they have any sense, however, Messrs Cameron and Osborne will give this play a very wide berth indeed.
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,****
,??Evening Standard by Henry Hitchings, 24 May 2012??
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,Laura Wade’s Posh made a splash at the Royal Court two years ago. Now it gets a well-deserved West End transfer: Wade has significantly changed her play, but it remains a heady blend of timely satire and outrageous romp.
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,It revolves around a single evening of the Riot Club, an Oxford dining society that bears an uncanny resemblance to the fabled and much reviled Bullingdon Club (of which David Cameron, George Osborne and Boris Johnson were all once members). After a period lying low following an unfortunate exposé in the press, the members convene to trade banter and celebrate their own magnificence. The venue is a country pub, remote from Oxford, where the club’s antics are too well known.
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,On the agenda are a 10-bird roast (though only a disappointing nine are served), lots of wine, embarrassing forfeits and a side order of bought-in sexual gratification. The philosophy is crude: anything broken can be paid for. The landlord may not like it, but apparently he deserves everything he gets: he is, after all, guilty of no less a crime than keeping his cheese in the fridge.
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,Wade deftly skewers the sense of entitlement that swirls like a sickly perfume around a certain kind of upper-class thug. Her characters seem to have everything, yet whinge relentlessly. When the play was first staged, Labour was in power. The situation is different now, but the Riot Club aren’t impressed by the Coalition, and their resentment positively seethes.
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,It’s a problem that Wade’s gilded youth seem quite so lacking in decency. Only the disenchanted club president (Tom Mison) hints at reserves of humanity. There’s little to suggest the possibility of a world that’s not as heartless as the one the rollicking toffs embody.
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,Leo Bill and Henry Lloyd-Hughes are once again excellent as leaders of that cabal. So are Max Bennett and Harry Lister Smith, both new to the cast. Yet it’s the tautness of the ensemble work orchestrated by director Lyndsey Turner that impresses most. Posh combines twisted humour with ripe excess and a cruelly precise topicality. For many it will leave a bitter taste in the mouth. But, as the characters say with lip-smacking approval, it’s savage.
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,****
,??WhatsOnStage by Michael Coveney, 24 May 2012??
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,The upper-class bad boys are back in town in this timely Royal Court transfer of Laura Wade’s astonishing, metaphorical and brutal Posh, in which the dressed-up members of an Oxford dining club come rapping alive from the gilded frames of ancestral portraits in a gentlemen’s inner London sanctum.
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,This brilliant scene follows the set-up: the revival of the Riot Club in times of political consensus and lily-livered drifting by young Tom Hollander lookalike Guy Bellingford (Joshua Maguire) and his ennobled uncle Jeremy (Simon Shepherd); in the same hushed room, at the end, Jeremy sounds the all-clear for licensed posh barbarism and hints at not only a cover-up, but a political coup.
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,On first viewing in 2010, before the general election, Posh seemed an exuberant satire on the Bullingdon Club at Oxford, where the elite members – who, in the past, have included the current Prime Minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Mayor of London – drink till they drop (ie, get well and truly "château-ed"), trash the dining room and pay the bill, whatever it is, in crisp large notes.
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,Now, with Ed Miliband announcing in the House of Commons yesterday that, in spite of a coalition government, the “nasty” party is back, the play gathers further strength. With a few sly re-writes, it has intensified that sense in the country of an entitled ruling class feeling less sure of itself, and not just because the rest of us are tramping through their country homes courtesy of the National Trust.
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,“We might not be to your taste, but we always pay our way,” says Leo Bill’s febrile, volcanic Alistair Ryle – who is indeed easily riled, rather like David Cameron – before launching into the shocking speech about how tired he is of poor people and all their striving, “bursting a vein at the thought of there’s another floor their lift doesn’t go up to”.
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,The dressed-up members of an Oxford dining club come rapping alive from the gilded frames of ancestral portraits”Bill is tremendous, and now wears a tie (they read my first review!) for his fateful summons in the London club, pushing his 'poshness' into a curiously emphatic, downmarket expression. This is at one with the posh tendency to absorb rap and pop culture – as evidenced in the brilliant a cappella ensemble items that punctuate the hedonistic débâcle – and the appropriation of the term “mate”.
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,Lyndsey Turner’s production really misses one or two of the original cast – there’s a lack of definition here and there – and it was a common complaint around me in the back stalls that the actors’ articulation and audibility are poor. Wade’s scintillating construct of demotic dialogue, public schoolboy childishness and yobbishness – the Riot Club really are the privileged cousins of last autumn’s street protesters – deserves a better hearing.
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,Anthony Ward’s design of the remote country pub is craftily contained within the Masonic club context: the ghost of Lord Riot stalks the land, as well as the dinner, as the rituals and debauchery accelerate to a terrible climax. On the way, Jessica Ransom as the landlord’s daughter, and Charlotte Lucas as the lady of the night from the escort agency, provide surprise, and sterling, resistance.
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,??The Observer by Kate Kellaway, 27 May 2012??
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,_Posh_ is about an Oxbridge-educated upper class who believe prospering is a birth right. In less gifted hands than Laura Wade's, a play about an Oxbridge dining society (her Riot Club a version of the Bullingdon) would be tedious. Who wants to watch roaring boys drinking themselves to oblivion, trash the joint or inflict GBH on the landlord? But this reworking of the 2010 Royal Court production is a tour de force. It's terribly funny- or rather, funny and terrible. It packs the nastiest punch.
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,Wade's take on the immoral clubbishness of the establishment was applauded before the last election. Now, with David Cameron, former Bullingdon Club member, sharing the hot seat, it's not about to get less topical (she has worked the coalition into the revised script). But she is too good a playwright not to ask what drives her well-heeled vandals. What the makes the play so remarkable is that it goes way beyond satire. She alludes to graduates competing for internships, unable to find paid work. She even shows poshness as a social disability in some contexts (one diner is mugged).
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,She covers, with shrewd wit, aristocratic hard times (another diner tells his friends how a National Trust guide forbade him to go under the rope into his sitting room: "Yes I can, its my house.") Sympathetic she is not, but there is a penetrating intelligence behind Wade's every line.
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,As the men get obscenely blotto, any character they might have as individuals retreats. Wade registers the violent escapism of being a posh mob. She nails the truth- it's in the language itself- that class might be something to hide as well as flaunt. The brilliant dialogue is weirdly laced with streetwise slang among posh jargon: "savage" for good, "boff" for having sex, "chateaued" for drunk.
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,Lyndsey Turner's dynamic production doesn't miss a beat, and designer Anthony Ward has excelled himself with traditional portraits of pompously anonymous gents who, in a coup de theatre, break out of their frames as gyrating boys singing grime and rock numbers. The first-rate cast brings a criminal energy to the evening. But it's Steffan Rhodri's brilliant performance as the landlord that stands out- as does his character. His middle England, Marks & Spencer decency excites a particular condescension in the boys. His shock when he sees what they've done to his dining room is genuinely overwhelming.
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,??The Spectator by Jerry Hayes, 29 May 2012??
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,If you want attend a theatrical event that will make you laugh, cringe and send a shiver down your spine you won’t do much better than dropping into the Duke of York theatre to experience Laura Wade’s brilliantly written class satire, POSH. Whatever your view of Cameron, Oxford elitist clubs whose sole purpose is boorish behaviour, drunkenness and mindless destruction, this wonderful play is delightfully edgy. This is not class war: it is class Armageddon.
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,The play opens in the portraited grandeur of a gentleman’s club where a young man seeks advice from his uncle, a Cabinet minister in the Lords. It is a masterclass in the hidden codes of the privileged.
,The lad is angling for the Presidency of the Riot Club, a thinly disguised parody of the Bullingdon. And, as uncle Gezzer is an alumnus, who better to tell the boy how to make the most of the dinner he helping to organise. ‘Break a chandelier? In my day we’d been through three before we even sat down. Sometimes we dined in the dark’. The scene cleverly ends with the portraits of the good and the great coming to life in a disco version of ‘I’m Sexy and I Know It’.
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,Cut to the dining room of a family pub, where tailed Riot members arrive for dinner. All of them are caricatures of trustfundian privilege. The mop haired lad desperate to please. The tubby but dim beagler and the fencer who oozes confidence, arrogance, impeccable manners and testosterone from every pore.
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,‘Must go and have a shower as I smell of defeat. Not mine. The other chap’s’. But before he does he chirpily explains how his semen appears on a new member’s books, a club tradition. ‘Mine old boy. Always happy to wack one out for the club’.
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,For the next hour we are treated to a magnificent pastiche of upper class banter. ‘If you want a piss there are plenty of pot plants. Anything else, out of the window’. ‘Let’s pop on a plane to the Lebanon and boff anything in a burka’.
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,But the drunker they become the thinner the veneer of civilisation becomes and there is a palpable undercurrent of menace. What began as an evening of jolly japes and public school silliness begins to develop into something more sinister.
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,In Act Two there is a distinct change of gear. The boys are horribly drunk and have been let down by the chef and a ‘prozza’ who refused to perform blow jobs under the dining room table. The mood changes from Lord of the Dance to Lord of the Flies.
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,The landlord becomes the embodiment of everything they despise. ‘The sort of man who keeps his cheese in the f***ing fridge... it’s honest decent people who bloody work hard and believe in family values are making this country go to f***.’
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,He becomes the emblem of everything that is wrong. ‘We are prisoners of the National Trust. Some bastard told me off for walking in a roped off area. But it’s my f***ing home... I hate the f***ing poor’.
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,One fellow tries to introduce some balance.
,‘But I had a lovely drink in the bar with some of the locals’.
,‘I’m sure you did. But who paid, eh?’
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,POSH goes beyond parody and caricature and is an effective essay about class hatred. Those who have been born to rule despising the ghastly common little people who run things, when it should be them. The sort of people who believe that every problem can be solved with a cheque book and a blind eye. Those who use charm, manners and self-confidence merely as a weapon. Who have one thing in common: entitlement.
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,The awful thing is that we have all met their type. That is what makes this play so effective.
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,I will not single out any member of the company because they are all equally brilliant and effective. Whether you are Oxbridge, redbrick comprehensive oo public school I guarantee that you will thoroughly enjoy POSH. But hurry, this run ends in August.
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,Reviews from the Original Production:
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,****
,??The Sunday Times, By Naomi Alderman, April 25th 2010??
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,Oxford University thrives on mythology - on the stories that past and present students tell about themselves. Heres one: when I was at Oxford, a man I knew, an ex-public schoolboy, obtained the keys to another mans room and - how to put this? - passed a bowel movement on his floor. On purpose. And left it there. When his friend wanted to know what he'd done to deserve this, he explained it was an expression of friendship. Just like they'd done at his school, he said.
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,The characters in Laura Wade's play Posh would have no difficulty with this logic. They are members of the 'Riot Club' who take delight in destroying one another's possessions, not to mention emotional wellbeing, as a sign of a troubling sort of friendship. To join the club, members have to agree to have their room 'trashed', which includes, for example, suspending their clothes from the light fitting, so for a second 'it looks like someone hanged themselves', and having another man masturbate on their books. The Riot Club is most famed for its termly dinners, which begin with toasts and ceremony, and end with the destruction of the room they are held in. The play takes place mostly around one such dinner.
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,Wade herself didnt attend Oxford, although I wouldnt have been able to tell from the play: its characters and settings were extremely convincing. Most of us, of course, will never participate in a social circle quite like this, so its hard to tell how accurately the particular mores of the club are portrayed, but the dawning realisation for most ordinary Oxford students that there is a social stratum they can never reach - that, as one of the clubs members puts it, 'theres another floor their lift doesnt go up to' - is very real. It was this realisation that sowed the seed for my new novel, The Lessons, in which my middle-class narrator, James, goes up to Oxford and joins the wealthy set of the mercurial Mark, but finds himself increasingly out of his depth. I met people at Oxford who were wealthier and better connected than anyone Id previously encountered: one student was dropped off at the start of term by a diplomat relative in an ambassadorial car; several had trust funds. I was fascinated by these privileged lives, but noticed that an excess of money didnt seem to make them happier and ended up stripping some people of the ambitions and desires that keep the rest of us creatively engaged with life. I loved Oxford for its beauty and intellectual atmosphere; I hated it for its narrowness and pockets of privilege. Both these feelings have gone into The Lessons.
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,The sound most frequently made by the Riot Club - the drunken roaring of young upper-class men - evoked an almost Pav lovian reaction of dread in me. Perhaps because they behaved with an air of such entitlement, I ended up believing the university was really meant for men like this, not for studious middle-class Jewish girls.
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,There is, of course, a topical element to the play. The Riot Club is based on the real-life Oxford-based Bullingdon Club, whose motto is 'I like the sound of breaking glass', and whose former members include Boris Johnson and David Cameron. One doesnt have to be an advocate of class struggle to be disturbed by the idea that the mayor of our capital and the leader of the opposition once enjoyed smashing up private property before leaving a shower of banknotes in their wake as a humiliating recompense.
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,Wade herself is clearly disturbed by the club, although the sense of menace develops slowly across the play. At the start, the club members are mostly figures of fun. Guy Bellingfield, played with perfect overeager oiliness by Joshua McGuire, wants to make a mark on the club, but only by rethinking its catering. Ed Montgomery (Kit Harington), it emerges, hid his teddy bear from the room-trashing. For the first hour, it seems this might be a light comedy: the traditional British pursuit of laughing at the upper classes and their foibles. However, darker undertones emerge, then explode at the end in a way I found somewhat implausible.
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,There are fine depictions of the char acters representing the real world: Chris, the landlord of the pub where the dinner takes place (Daniel Ryan); his waitress daughter, Rachel (Fiona Button); and Charlie, the prostitute the club members book to service them during the meal (Charlotte Lucas). The two women, in particular, are played as the sanest characters in the face of increasing levels of sexual threat from drunk, aggressive young men. The staging is interesting, too: the boxed-in space of the formal dining room where the action takes place is surrounded by an industrial landscape, suggesting that the Riot Club is an anachronistic bubble within a utilitarian but colourless Britain.
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,It is one of the great problems of modern Britain - and of Oxford University, a quint essentially British institution - that we want to be proud of our history and traditions at the same time as understanding that they contain much to cause us shame. At my old college, Lincoln, on Ascension Day, senior students go up to the roof of Front Quad and hurl down hot pennies - heated in the oven - to waiting children from local schools. The children wear gloves; its all good fun. Yet this tradition has its roots in a particularly cruel form of charity: wealthy sons of nobility tossing coins to poor town children for the amusement of watching them burn themselves. Is it a hideous history, best forgotten, or a quaint ritual, important to preserve? This tension is everywhere in Oxford.
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,At the end of Poshs first act, the most aggressive club member, in sightfully and convincingly portrayed by Leo Bill, has a tour de force speech in which he rails against the levelling forces in modern Britain. The landlord 'thinks he can have anything if he works hard enough... thinks his daughters getting a useful education at Crapsville College... thinking theyre cultured cause they read a big newspaper and eat asparagus and pretend not to be racist... I am sick to f***ing death of poor people'. Posh is thoughtful, engaging, funny and ultimately troubling. It runs for almost three hours, mostly set in a single room, but feels pacey and wide-ranging. At its heart is a moral question: do we think fairness should be our most important value, or is it more vital to retain the eccentric colour of our history, even at the risk of creating monsters?
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,Class continues to be the great British theme, however much we might like to pretend it has gone away. It is a part of our national story; the days when Britain was the greatest power on earth were also the days of strictly enforced class boundaries. The empire we exported was based on the premise that our upper class was destined to rule not just other Britons, but the world. Our stately homes were built by these people, our impressive national buildings commissioned by them, our universities founded by them. The question posed by Posh, and by the continued existence of clubs such as the Bullingdon, is to what extent we still consider them, and their values, admirable
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,*****
,??Time Out, By Sam Marlowe, April 20th 2010??
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,Laura Wade's depiction of wealth and privilege is savagely funny, but it's undercut by an observation as coolly sharp as cut glass: there's a reason why the upper-class dolts she portrays behave as if they and their kind run Britain - it's because, on the whole, they do. And with an election looming, her play is a timely warning against making that inequality manifest by handing the keys of No 10 to a former member of just such an elitist institution as Wade and director Lindsey Turner show us, in hideous, braying full flow.
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,At a rural gastropub, the Riot Club - an Oxford University dining society closely related to the real-life Bullingdon - meets for its regular huzzah, at which it is customary to get absolutely 'chateaued' before wrecking the premises. But this evening, all is not blue-blooded brotherly love. Discontented members, believing that the club is failing to live up to its notoriety, are angling to seize its presidency from the current incumbent. Guy (Joshua McGuire) tries to curry favour by devising a menu of repulsive excess, Harry (Harry Hadden-Paton) hires 'a prozzer' and Dimitri (Henry Lloyd-Hughes) arranges a post-prandial jaunt to Reykjavik. Cracks in the camaraderie appear: Greek Dimitri is on the receiving end of racist jibes, a new boy is pilloried for his 'Brideshead'-ish teddy bear - 'It's a family heirloom!' he protests - and another's sexual confusion erupts in an ugly act of macho posturing involving the pub landlord's daughter. And all of them seethe with resentment at what they regard as the erosion of respect due to them as a birthright, and at a modern world in which their family's country piles must be thrown open to plebeian visitors and poor Mummy, decamped to the Knightsbridge flat, despairs at the influx of Arabs in the area.
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,The action is framed by two scenes in which Guy's Tory MP godfather (Simon Shepherd), ensconced in a gentleman's club that is essentially a grown-up version of the Riot, outlines the importance of allegiance and the way in which the old school tie binds the privileged together, ensuring that they collaborate to protect and perpetuate their position of power. The play is a little overlong, its build towards violent climax inevitable. But as grotesque as Turner's superbly acted production maybe, at its core it's also chillingly lifelike and horribly pertinent. Nastily effective.
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,??The Independent, By Kate Bassett, April 18th 2010??
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,The Royal Court is doing its darndest to sabotage the Conservatives' election campaign. That's what it looks like anyway, because Posh Laura Wade's new main house play is a fictionalised group portrait of something not that far from the Bullingdon Club.
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,If anyone needs reminding, that's the dining club of super-rich and aristocratic Oxford University chaps whose longstanding custom it is to smash up local restaurants, and then escape trouble by throwing money at the gobsmacked staff. David Cameron, George Osborne and Boris Johnson are old Bullingdon boys.
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,In Lyndsey Turner's superbly cast ensemble production, nine young toffs and their feckless president, Tom Mison's James, descend on a gastro pub in the Oxfordshire countryside. They hire a private room ox-blood red with antlers on the wall and dress up in archaic tail-coated uniforms, as in those 1980s photographs of Cameron and co. Except this bunch call themselves the Riot Club and, since they're using an iPhone to check that a call girl is on her way, the setting must be now. Thus Wade keeps one step clear of a potentially libellous biodrama, while exploring the broader possibilities of a political and economic allegory.
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,Her point is partly plus a change. In a darkly satirical vein, these arrogant twerps who regard top City and parliamentary posts as their birthright build up to their act of shameless vandalism, while preserving the Club's ludicrous traditions. They bray the National Anthem, make endless toasts to long-dead members, and no one is allowed to leave the room. Leaving the room is a club offence, so sick bags are provided.
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,What's hair-raising, as well as comical, is how coarsely bigoted these supposedly well-bred chaps are behind closed doors, slipping on the mask of abstemious decency whenever they have to placate the landlord, Daniel Ryan's burly Chris. There's a chilling trace of Patrick Hamilton's 1920s thriller Rope in these young gents' hidden brutality.
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,The tension mounts as they indulge in leadership in-fighting (a touch of New Labour there?) and as the masks begin to slip. This could all end in bloodshed. Leo Bill's drunken, vituperative Alistair rails against small businessmen like this landlord for wrecking the financial status quo, and his chums turn their attention to the waitress, the landlord's not entirely obliging daughter, Rachel (Fiona Button).
,
,More intellectual brilliance would have been welcome. The political arguments are somewhat fuzzy even when Alistair is sober, and there is a whiff of demonising melodrama about the close, when he is conspiratorially recruited as future PM material. If there is a stand-out performance, it's David Dawson as the fey Hugo, with his feverish, glittering grin. However, everyone is superb: this is an array of young acting talent to rival that of The History Boys.
,
,
,****
,??The Financial Times, By Ian Shuttleworth, April 18th 2010??
,
,Seldom can a shows opening night have been so topical in so many ways. The fictitious Riot Club in Laura Wades play is loosely inspired by the real-life Bullingdon Club at Oxford University, which counts both Conservative leader David Cameron and shadow chancellor George Osborne among its former members, so a press performance on the night of the televised party leaders debate seemed fortuitous. Then one of the 10 young toffs whose bibulous dinner is portrayed announces that theyre going on somewhere afterwards. To Reykjavik, in fact. Were going tonight? asks another. Er, not on the night an Icelandic volcano cloud halts all flights to and from Britain. Rather less fortuitous, that one.
,
,The Eyjafjallajkull eruption would be beyond them; but otherwise there seems to be little these young bloods do not instinctively believe they can bend to their will. Wades play is not simply, if at all, a broadside in the class war. What is under the microscope is not patrician privilege in itself (although one of the meals ritual toasts can only be delivered by someone with an aristocratic title), but the sense of entitlement that informs it.
,
,The blithe assurance with which they set out to get bladdered and trash a restaurants private dining room is fundamentally no different from the bravado of a bling-laden posse pouring Dom Prignon on to the floor of a nightclub (the play is punctuated by bizarre a capella renditions of RnB numbers) or of a petty benefit fraudster...and, indeed, these nobs share some of the same suppressed insecurities. It is significant that their most withering contempt is directed not towards the proles but towards the middle classes, whose aspirations and sheer numbers have wrested so much power away from them.
,
,Director Lyndsey Turner has crafted a fine ensemble production, which does its best to keep a lid on broad comedic playing for fear of attenuating the plays power. Leo Bill gradually emerges as the most dangerous of the Rioters in several ways, with Fiona Button and Charlotte Lucas each shaping up as more than the token females they might at first appear. The violent climax and the Machiavellian coda are both predictable, but neither falls flat. So is this a play whose time has come? Check back after the election next month.
,
,****
,??The Evening Standard, By Henry Hitchings, April 16th 2010??
,
,To most people the phenomenon of the Oxbridge dining society seems about as real as a unicorns horn. The prospect of a government that features more than one alumnus of this gilded world feels distressingly weird.
,
,In Laura Wades beautifully observed, very funny play, that world is anatomised. Her invention, the Riot Club, is a kind of Bullingdon lite an Oxford coterie made up of minor aristos, landed yobs and foreign plutocrats.
,
,We focus on an end-of-term dinner, in the dining room of a rural gastropub conveniently remote from Oxford and the clubs bad reputation. Its an occasion for messy tomfoolery, flagrant snobbery and violence.
,
,Chippy sophomore Guy, informed by his uncle that it was once normal to gorge on a 10-bird roast and smash every chandelier in sight, is inspired to up the ante. This term the menu is going to be special. And, as it turns out, others have big plans: getting a prozzer in, and jetting off somewhere unusual for a postprandial shindig.
,
,The clubs members engage with one another in a curiously antagonistic style. For instance, when it emerges that the president has applied to work at a German bank, his application form is read out as if its the most toe-curling of pre-adolescent love letters.
,
,The swanky horseplay, repellent yet fascinating, is brilliantly acted, while Lyndsey Turners skilful direction means theres never a dull moment. There are deft and surprising touches, such as a close harmony version of Wileys electro-grime anthem Wearing My Rolex. Surrealism is never far away.
,
,The ensemble work is outstandingly good: fluid, layered, always plausible. The standout performances come from Henry Lloyd-Hughes, magnetic as sinister Dimitri, and Leo Bill, thrillingly repulsive as the reptilian Alistair.
,
,There are flecks of implausibility. Would a Riot Club member really refer to the toilet and sneer at someone who called it a lavatory? Where are the gruesome initiation rituals? And the Riot Club members dont even drink all that much. Still, Wades gifts as a satirist are beyond doubt. While its conclusion strives a little too hard for immediate relevance, this play combines topicality with dramatic appeal. It mostly works a treat. To adopt the preposterous argot of its characters: Mate this is savage.
,
,****
,??Whats On Stage, By Michael Coveney, April 16th 2010??
,
,Scabrously funny, disgustingly smug, and deeply disturbing, Laura Wades brilliant new play Posh shows a group of public school rich boys behaving badly in an Oxfordshire private dining club and lamenting their loss of a country they think they both own and created.
,
,Clearly based on the Bullingdon at Oxford University (of which David Cameron, George Osborne and Boris Johnson were prominent members), the plays Riot Club is also a metaphor in the class divide, and represents a streak of political brutality in the Conservative Party that for the moment lies dormant as candidate Dave develops his compassionate image.
,
,Its hugely ironic that one of Camerons big ideas is for a citizens army recruited to repair a damaged society, presumably the one duffed up by his chums in the Bullingdon. The most ferocious member of Wades Riot Club is Leo Bills ratty and vengeful Alistair Ryle who delivers a broadside against the mediocrity, poverty and aspirations of the hoi polloi, as well as chaps who keep their cheese in the fridge.
,
,The others live in country houses overrun by tourists and one has been reduced to sneaking an application to join the Deutsche Bank. They assemble in Anthony Wards wittily conceived gastropub dining room in their evening dress of red bow ties, stripy waistcoats and gold-lapelled dinner jackets to get well and truly chateaued while consuming a ten-bird-roast and awaiting a local prostitute (Charlotte Lucas).
,
,The evening develops as an orgiastic ritual of humiliation involving their jovial pub host (Daniel Ryan) and his waitress daughter Rachel (Fiona Button), who is studying languages at Newcastle (Youd need to, there says one of the wags). The climactic horror is the toff equivalent of the baby-stoning scene in Edward Bonds Saved; this is a classic Royal Court play with a view from the other end of the telescope.
,
,Lyndsey Turners superb production makes great use of a capella songs (and the toreadors march from Carmen) to cover scene changes and heighten the raucous mood, which is enhanced with cunning beauty by Paule Constables lighting and includes cross fades to the be-wigged founding members of the club in a dissolving portrait.
,
,That continuity is expressed in the scenes that book-end the dinner in an oak-panelled London club where a Tory grandee (Simon Shepherd) first encourages his nephew (Joshua McGuire, a new Tom Hollander) to maintain the Riots standards of excess and finally fingers Alistair (who should be wearing a tie) as the sort of chap they can ease out of trouble with the law and into a top job, perhaps even the top job.
,
,Tom Mison as the secret banker, Henry Lloyd-Hughes as a Greek rich kid (hes arranged a post-prandial group outing to Reykjavik) and the extraordinary David Dawson as a febrile poet of the right also shine in a hand-picked cast that do wonderful injustice to the play of the year so far and a fantastic Court follow-through to Jerusalem and Enron.
,
,****
,??The Daily Telegraph, By Charles Spencer, April 16th 2010??
,
,As the three main party leaders debated live on television last night, the Royal Court marked the election campaign with a good, old-fashioned piece of class war.
,
,Laura Wades Posh is a dark comedy mostly set during a riotous, drunken dinner of an Oxford club closely modelled on the real-life Bullingdon, which counts David Cameron, Boris Johnson and George Osborne among its former members.
,
,Its a piece clearly designed to damage the Tory party at this sensitive time, but what was notable at the final preview of the play was just how many plummy accents there were in the stalls. The well-heeled and well-connected are beating a path to Posh. Perhaps they are hoping to relive the heady intoxicated days of their undergraduate youth, and recapture what Evelyn Waugh memorably described as the sound of English county families baying for broken glass.
,
,The piece is undoubtedly entertaining, though I cant imagine David Cameron will enjoy it much. It persuasively captures that off-putting sense of entitlement that so often emanates from those who have been to leading public schools, and it captures the wit and intelligence of the characters, before they become hog-whimperingly drunk, as well as their revolting snobbery, condescension, cruelty and violence.
,
,I suppose I also ought to declare a lack of interest here. Though often drunk and sometimes drugged in my own student days at Oxford, I was never a member of the Bullingdon, though I am listed as such on Wikipedia. Watching this portrait of hoorays turning swinish, Im cordially glad that I wasnt.
,
,Wade captures the tribal language, the joshing and later the maudlin gibbering of these young blades with a maliciously sharp ear. And though not all 10 of the Riot Club members in their flashy tailcoats come to fully detailed life on stage, Lyndsey Turner directs a superbly assured and acted production that moves from uneasy laughter (the scene involving a dignified prostitute is a comic gem of social embarrassment) to something altogether darker and nastier.
,
,Where I quarrel with the play is in its paranoid conspiracy theory that membership of clubs like the Bullingdon creates a network of power and influence in the politics of this country, a theory epitomised by an older, suavely sinister former member (Simon Shepherd) who appears in the opening and closing scenes, covering things up and pushing careers along. My bet is that Cameron and Co now all regard membership of the Bullingdon as more of a hindrance than a help.
,
,Among the cast, Leo Bill as the most malign and hate-filled of the gang, David Dawson as a suave gay member, Richard Goulding as a genuinely likeable aristo and Tom Mison as the president who is beginning to loathe his own club are particularly memorable.
,
,There is sterling work too, from Daniel Ryan as the pub landlord appalled to discover he has a bunch of upper-crust hooligans on his hands, Fiona Button as his plucky daughter and Charlotte Lucas as the call girl who puts the clubs members firmly in their place. The big question now is whether Dave, Boris and George will have the guts to see the show.
,
,'*_Wade hits a number of nails on the head_*. She pins down the rage the club's members feel that their country has been stolen from them. *_She harpoons the masonic nature of much of English life in which self-perpetuating elites offer each other lifelong protection_*. Yet Wade also suggests that, when the chips are down, the Darwinian instinct for survival triumphs over the comradely ethos. All this is vividly portrayed and applicable to current politics'.
,*_By Michael Billington_*.
,
,****
,??The Sunday Express by Mark Shenton, 27 May 2012??
,
,"set of Oxbridge undergraduates prove utterly unprincipled"
,
,"The picture that emerges is both gripping as social anthropology and gruesome as human drama."
,

Ticket Information: Tickets £52.50, £45.00, £35.00, £25.00, £15.00
,(Premium seats £75)
,Seniors Advance £39.50 Mon - Thurs (£29.50 on the day)
,Students £25 Wednesday matinee
,Groups 8+ £39.50 Mon - Thurs
,Schools 10+ £45/£35 reduced to £19.50 Mon-Thurs
,Access rate £15 - £52.50
,
,20 Day Seats are available for every performance from 10am at the Duke Of York's Theatre, St Martin's Lane. Maximum of 2 per person, £10 each.
,
,The Royal Court is selling an allocation of seats per performance, across all price bands. Further tickets are available from "Ambassadors Theatre Group":http://www.atgtickets.com/Posh-Tickets/122/2647/:new-window
,
,Performances from 27 July take place during the London Olympics, so please check your travel routes in advance to make sure you can get to and from the Duke of York's Theatre safely. The Society of London Theatre (SOLT) and Transport for London (TfL) have released a special travel guide for theatre goers during this summer’s Olympic and Paralympic Games. It is available on the "Official London Theatre website":www.officiallondontheatre.co.uk/theatre2012 and on the "TfL website":www.tfl.gov.uk/london2012.

Marketable Venue Title: Duke of York's Theatre, St. Martin's Lane, WC2N 4BG

The Royal Court Theatre returns to its previous West End home, the Duke of York’s Theatre, with Posh, Jumpy and Constellations – three of the biggest hits in its history. Ambassador Theatre Group will join forces with Royal Court Theatre Productions to present this 2012 West End season. 

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 just a jolly: they’re planning a revolution. 
Welcome to the Riot Club.

Writer Laura Wade is a graduate of the Royal Court Young Writers Programme. Her first play for the Royal Court, Breathing Corpses, played in the Jerwood Theatre Upstairs in 2005 and won her the Critics’ Circle Theatre Award for Most Promising Playwright, the Pearson Playwrights Best Play Award, the George Devine Award and an Olivier Award Nomination for Outstanding Achievement in an Affiliate Theatre. She is currently adapting Posh into a feature film for Blueprint Pictures. Her other recent work includes the Australian Chamber Orchestra’s Kreutzer vs Kreutzer(Sydney Opera House and Australian national tour) and Alice, a new adaptation of Alice in Wonderland (Crucible Theatre, Sheffield) with Lyndsey Turner. 

Director Lyndsey Turner’s’ work at the Royal Court includes Contractions, A Miracle and Our Private Life. She has also worked at the Royal Court as Trainee Associate Director and International Associate. She is associate director at Sheffield Theatres where her work includes Alice and The Way of the World. Her other credits include Edgar And Annabel, There Is A War (National Theatre), Joseph K and Nocturnal (Gate); My Romantic History (Traverse, Bush, Sheffield Theatres) and The Lesson (Arcola). 

Running Time 2hrs 35mins approx including one interval

The Royal Court is selling an allocation of seats per performance, across all price bands. Further tickets are available from <a href="http://www.royalcourtatdukes.com">Ambassadors Theatre Group</a> and other ticket agencies.

20 Day Seats are available for every performance from 10am at the Duke Of York’s Theatre, St Martin’s Lane. Maximum of 2 per person, £10 each.

For Access bookings please contact 0844 871 7677 or email ticketcentreteamleaders@theambassadors.com

<img src="http://system.spektrix.com/royalcourt/files/8410c18a-2c91-4033-be48-a0e8af44d371.jpg" alt="" /> <a href="http://www.royalcourttheatre.com/shop/programmes">Playtext available from our bookshop</a> (UK postage only)

Performances from 27 July take place during the London Olympics, so please check your travel routes in advance to make sure you can get to and from the Duke of York’s Theatre safely. The Society of London Theatre (SOLT) and Transport for London (TfL) have released a special travel guide for theatre goers during this summer’s Olympic and Paralympic Games. It is available on the <a href="www.officiallondontheatre.co.uk/theatre2012">Official London Theatre website</a> and on the <a href="www.tfl.gov.uk/london2012">TfL website</a>.