Sydney Reviews

Entitlement and envy. Privilege and knowing your place.

Boys will be boys and Rule Britannia. And all that rot.

It’s POSH by gosh, a play by Laura Wade. Laura wades into the murky waters of the ongoing war between The Upper Class and the Upwardly Mobile, boom crash, class clash, the well heeled heels of Knob Hill, smug snobbery and what school did you go to arrogance?

Thuggery, buggery and bastardisation, the old school tie that binds and blinds, the born to rule attitude and mindset is on display in POSH with all its pomposity, pretension and perniciousness. We witness a gathering of The Riot Club, an Oxford dining clique only recently reconvening after a scandal, and banished to a boondocks boozer, a gentrified gastro pub in the sticks.

The point of the evening is to get shitfaced, trash the joint, and enjoy some jolly rogering with a “prozzy”. But there’s also a power play present as a couple of candidates jockey for the Club’s presidency.

POSH is a gory Tory story containing many passages of sharp analytic precision and demonstrates a skill of imposing a sudden chill down its rambunctious narrative spine.

POSH confronts the audience by questioning our complicity in bad behaviour, do we laugh too easily at the pathetic, paralytic drunk, the randy orgy organiser jolly japist a slight remove from vile rapist?

Dynamically directed by Margaret Thanos with an absolutely splendid set design by Soham Apte, POSH is certainly a lavish production, a visual feast.

The members of The Riot Club, are played by a well drilled team of ten, a star team full of attack and abandon, a consolidated ensemble consisting of Christian Paul Byers, A J Evans, Toby Blome, Ryan Hodson, Tristan Black, Jack Richardson, Dylan O'Connor, Anthony Yangoyan, Roman Delo and Max Cattana.

Solid support is provided by Mike Booth as Chris, the group’s reviled publican, Dominique Purdue as his daughter, Rachel, Scarlett Waters as the prozzy, Charlie, and Charles Mayer as House of Lords mentor and godfather of one of the boys, Jeremy, pure patrician in chalk stripe suit and cravat, and preference for whisky with water, doing double duty as a spectral turn as the presence of LORD RYOTT, bewigged and powdered, a silver spooned sot, both performances oozing aristocracy on a cracker.