By every measure, Posh, the new play by award-winning playwright Laura Wade, ought to be a success. Its plot follows a night in the life of the Riot Club, a (just barely) fictional dinner club made up of uber-priviliged students at Oxford Unversity, and whose modus operandi involves renting a private dining room at a pub, gorging themselves on both food and wine, and then, quite literally, thoroughly demolishing the place. The whole thing is masterfully constructed, both in the way the action unfolds and the characters are introduced. Wade, too, has a fabulous ear for dialogue, giving the members of the club sharply realistic speeches, arguments, and conversations. The set is fine, the direction elegant, and the acting - largely from a group of unknowns - is reined and believable. As a critique of the spoiled and uncontrollable upper class, the whole thing succeeds admirably.
But if the show is easy to admire, it's damningly difficult to enjoy. The key to the problem lies about halfway through the show, when one of the members of the group, Alistair Ryle (Leo Bill) delivers an impassioned monologue in which he rails against the poor, the middle class, and basically anyone who has to work for a living. "Don't you see?" he calls to his nine enraptured peers. "They hate us!" There's the rub, and there we are: stuck in a room for three hours with ten people who we would rather not be stuck in a room with at all. That's not to say that protagonists always have to be heroic, likable figures - one of the most powerful works of film in recently memory, There Will Be Blood, was built around Daniel Plainview, a ruthless and frighteningly amoral man. But Plainview - like other antiheroes, or even villains - had quirks, personality traits which pulled us, in spite of ourselves, towards him: he was a fascinating person. None of the main characters in Posh, on the other hand, are anything approaching engaging; only the bit roles - the landlord of the pub and his daughter, and a prostitute who makes a brief appearance - are sympathetic in the least. Nearly all ten members of the Riot Club are nothing less than absolute scumbags. Their humour is occasionally diverting but mostly vulgar and fleeting, and sitting listening to them cavort about the room complaining how the world is conspiring against them - or, in the show's excruciating penultimate scene, watching them devise a plan for self-preservation while a man lies bleeding to death at their feet - is akin to plucking out hairs from your head one by one. It's not to say that it's not true to life, or that it's not effective. It just doesn't compelling theatre make. We wouldn't want to have dinner with these people in real life. Why do so at the theatre?
Posh score: 50
