Posh (Oberon Modern Plays)

Product Information

Posh was nominated as Best New Play at both the Evening Standard Theatre Awards and Theatregoers' Choice Awards in 2011. 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.

Posh: : Student Editions Laura Wade Methuen Drama Posh: : Student Editions Laura Wade Methuen Drama

But as the alcohol flows and the incessant chattering comes to a head, the dark thoughts in the club members heads come barrelling out. Initially no more than love interest, her later mistreatment makes the class conflict all too tangible. I also felt that the toffee-nosed oik-speak, though horribly funny, was too relentless to ring quite true. Wade’s found a number of ways of making a meal into a story; there are rivalries between the members to succeed, or maybe even supplant, the current president of the Club. Members of an elite student dining society, the boys are bunkering down for a wild night of debauchery, decadence and good wine.

It was nominated for Best New Play at both the Evening Standard Awards and for the Theatregoers' Choice Awards. I really enjoyed it -- it's such an unexpected and shocking play, and an accurate critique on the privileged. It does not give the play over to wholesale caricature, but it slips the last surly bonds of “realism” and unveils a piece that now comes across as a biting, grotesque fable about a class that wants to reassert its brutal rights to special treatment – with the exhilarating twist that the oppressors are played by a group traditionally perceived as oppressed. In a rather conspiratorial scene, the grandee listens to some of his ideas - even though they include disbanding the Riot Club - and offers to have the charges dropped and, after a brief career in finance, will welcome him into the Tory Party, where, it is suggested, a consitutency and perhaps seat in Cabinet will be waiting for him.

Lack of support for theatre is to discourage dissent, says

The Riot Club tails, for instance, are beautifully made and very expensive: they help the wearers strut, and give them a certain attitude. It would have left Posh open to the wrong kind of criticism: that I was just a chippy, lefty Northerner jealous of their wealth and position (don't start me on "the politics of envy", that lazy political Tipp-Ex used to obliterate criticism or dissent).A number of prominent Conservative politicians have been members of the Bullingdon, including David Cameron, George Osborne and Boris Johnson. Laura Wade's new play is highly topical: it is about the sense of entitlement to power of a privileged, wealthy, public school and Oxbridge elite.

Posh - Laura Wade - Google Books

Her boyfriend Samuel West, the actor and director who is the father of her five-month-old daughter, was an Oxford contemporary of Boris Johnson and David Cameron (former members of the Bullingdon) and so would have been able to glimpse their debauched, dinner-jacketed antics as he biked off to a student play rehearsal. I don’t doubt that the Tory party has literally and figuratively covered up crimes, but this seemed to reduce a rather more multiple anatomisation of upper-class masculinity in the first part of the play and a political analysis of the Cameroons to a crudely reductive point. I was reminded of a famous essay Henry Fairlie wrote in the Spectator in 1955, in which he defined "the establishment" as "the whole matrix of official and social relations within which power in Britain is exercised".The production's scene changes were marked by the Riot Club's a cappella renditions of contemporary popular music such as " Wearing My Rolex" by Wiley; the music was arranged by James Fortune. From 2007 to 2011, Wade lived with actor Samuel West, [21] son of actors Timothy West and Prunella Scales.