Review Round-up: Posh is top of the class

While in 2010 Posh received mixed reviews, the play appears to have grown on the critics with this West End transfer. It runs until 4 August.

In the cast are Joshua Maguire, Simon Shepherd, Leo Bill, Jessica Ransom, Charlotte Lucas, Harry Lister Smith, Max Bennett, Henry Lloyd-Hughes, Edward Killingback, Steffan Rhodri, Richard Goulding, Jolyon Coy, Tom Mison and Pip Carter. Lyndsey Turner directs.

Michael
Coveney
Whatsonstage.com
★★★★

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…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. 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.

Michael
Billington
Guardian
★★★★

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. It has undergone a good deal
of revision since its
Royal Court premiere, necessarily acknowledging that we now have
a coalition government…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…With
eight of the original cast returning, Lyndsey Turner‘s production
retains its buoyancy and precision…its success lies in harpooning
the way power operates through a succession of nods and winks in our
supposedly open, egalitarian society.

Charles
Spencer
Telegraph
★★★★

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…But you don’t have to go along with Wade’s paranoid
lefty politics to enjoy the piece…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…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. 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.

Henry
Hitchings
Evening
Standard
★★★★

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…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…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…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.

Paul
Taylor
Independent
★★★