How long is posh the play

Most universities have a plethora of clubs available to provide somewhere for like-minded folk to congregate and cogitate. Clubs can be based on a shared interest — The Dr Who Appreciation Society for example — or on a common connection. Indeed, at Oxford University there is a club that is exclusively aimed at those with wealth, potential power and connections. Known as the Bullingdon Club which, although being ultra exclusive, has become quite notorious over the last few years.

So notorious in fact, that Laura Wade wrote a play based on its supposed exploits in The play is called Posh and a new version has just opened at the Pleasance Theatre,. Jeremy is worried that the club is about to have one of its dinners and he want his godson to ensure that no word of the dinner gets out into the press and causes another scandal.

This means the club needs to desist from its usual riotous behaviour when dining. Come the night of the dinner and Chris the Landlord of a small country pub has worked with his Daughter Rachel Toni Peach to prepare the private dining room for his 10 guests.

Researching the original play in was tricky, Wade has said, because: "There isn't a website that helps. By the end, Wade said she felt her background might actually have been an advantage: "It was freeing because it meant I had room to make stuff up and imagine my way behind that closed door, and try to take the audience with me," she said.

Wade did have an Oxbridge informant at close hand, however. 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.

West, like Wade, has earned a radical reputation due to his outspoken comments about politics and arts funding. Their new daughter joins what some would call an acting dynasty as the grandchild of Prunella Scales and Timothy West. Samuel, however, says the Wests are a family business and not a dynasty.

Whatever the West legacy, there is a tradition of political activism. Three years ago, at 76, Grandfather West demonstrated against tax avoidance, urged on by Scales. Cinema audiences may wonder whether a new character in Wade's screenplay — a state school undergraduate from Huddersfield called Lauren Small — is intended to represent the author herself. Initially no more than love interest, her later mistreatment makes the class conflict all too tangible.

Wade's first play as an A-level student also featured a character close to her own experience. Limbo was staged in a studio at the prestigious Crucible theatre and was all about "a teenage girl in Sheffield going through extremely mild emotional difficulties", Wade once recalled. In her 20s Wade's career built quickly, with two chilling plays, Breathing Corpses and Colder Than Here , staged in , and an adaptation of Alice in Wonderland in But it was Posh that caught the mood of the times, opening on the eve of a general election.

Interviewed in the Observer before the first night, Wade insisted she had not painted a hackneyed portrait of the ex-Etonians who now wanted to lead Britain. It's all a bit 'rah'. But as we went on, I realised it was important that the play's voices be modern,too. In the unlikely event that any non-theatre…. Anonymous comments are disabled in this journal. Your IP address will be recorded. Log in No account? Create an account. Remember me. Previous Share Flag Next. They probably won't have a hit this year to rival last year's two juggernauts, but so far Posh is the Royal Court's big seller, having sold out already.

Purely shallow elements were in no way a factor, it just happens that sales suddenly got quite good when this cast photo was released. Not that I'm in any way exempt from this kind of reason for booking a show but for what it's worth I'd bought my ticket front row centre of the stalls before that photo came out.

Just call me psychic. Anyway, on to the review itself. Laura Wade's Posh is perhaps on the surface a departure from the Royal Court's tradition of kitchen sink drama, but it all feeds into the same social conscience, here turning the focus onto a section of society who hold a lot of the power, and with an election on the way may soon hold more of it again.