Posh

ADC Theatre, 22nd-26th February, 7.45pm, £6-10

Directed by Josh Stamp-Simon

[rating:4/5]

Before the curtain even rose, director Josh Stamp-Simon fairly broke my leftist heart in his notes with the promise that this production would not be ‘yet another instance of Tory bashing.’ Yet even with the elimination of this great national exercise, the ADC’s staging of Posh succeeds in being more than box-ticking in smug, self-referential irony. The central characters’ expectation of automatic deference is revealed to be increasingly under threat in a series of grotesque exchanges with social outsiders who threaten this complacency.

The opening scene suffered from a lazily static staging of a meeting between club alumnus Jeremy (John Lindsay) and Guy (Alex Gomar). The latter’s awkwardness under social pressure was overdone: pitched too closely to a sarcastic vision of what a posh person might look like if they felt maybe just a little bit uncomfortable. For the dynamic that was established by the dialogue between the pair to convince, the audience needed to see Gomar truly squirm, rather than perch enthusiastically on the edge of his leather armchair.

But there are only a few such examples of mismatched delivery, in general the acting was of an excellent standard. George Johnston’s interpretation of a public schoolboy turned Oxbridge undergraduate was, in particular, uncannily accurate. As Alistair, his rage at the insolence of an escort who refuses to perform oral sex on the group contained all the righteous indignation of a Pitt Club member rising from a pool of chunder to fetch his fiorentina pizza downstairs.

Photographs by Phil Howe

This performance, more than any other in the production, uncovered the disturbing balance between the public charm of those privileged by birth to a sense of superiority, and the vile behaviour that this attitude of entitlement encourages in private. Matt Kilroy, as George, also deserves credit for his exquisitely-timed bumbles, managing to produce a performance that portrayed the desperate naivety of the ‘upper’ classes in an endearing, Colin Firth kind of way.

Short set piece interludes of music and ‘club’ lighting worked surprisingly well in a piece where the acting style was predominantly based on heightened naturalism. Particularly worthy of commendation was the inclusion of a certain dance routine (no spoilers here) for the fact that it was a real risk, whilst also elegantly satirising the embarrassing public school boy obsession with hip-hop culture.

Disappointing, however, was the lack of atmospheric progression after these moments of stylistic hedonism. If they were meant to indicate the passing of time (or courses in the meal) then some thought should have been given to developing the drunkenness of the group in the subsequent scenes. Instead, the conversation resumed at the same level of sobriety as before, leaving the audience to wonder when the all the ‘riot’ stuff was going to happen.

Jack Hudson, as Toby, was the only one to seem convincingly pissed by the second half, though his metamorphosis into Earl Riot was a confusing episode. In a scene where naturalism was abandoned, Hudson’s convulsions seemed underplayed and this absurd interruption to the dinner was one of the few moments where a lighting change should have been used to indicate this switch in performance styles, and wasn’t.

Much will be made of the staging of this play in a theatre whose audience is closer than perhaps any other to the characters satirised on-stage. The production succeeds in creating moments of genuine unease and disgust, but the willingness of the ADC audience to laugh at even the most repulsive of the lines and actions suggested that something was amiss in the transmission of the play’s concerns over the morality governing the old boys’ clubs of Oxbridge, who then go on to govern the country. This discord, however, only reinforced the necessity of staging such a play, which, no matter what one’s relationship to the university, the Conservative party or the type of ‘posh’ people featured, forces its audience to examine the dark nature of class privilege and elitism.