Posh by Laura Wade: Play for study

Posh first opened in April 2010 at the Royal Court Theatre, London, shortly before the general election that saw David Cameron become Prime Minister. It could not have been more timely for Laura Wade's play, a thinly veiled exposé of Oxford University's notorious Bullingdon Club, of which David Cameron, Boris Johnson and George Osborne were all members in their student days.

A private, all-male dining club founded in the eighteenth century, the Bullingdon is for a privileged elite who wear tailor-made uniforms, drink to excess, behave extremely badly, and pay up front for the damage they cause.

Laura Wade is one of a new generation of talented women playwrights, including Lucy Prebble, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Polly Stenham, Lucy Kirkwood, Alecky Blythe, Nina Raine and Bola Agbaje. Prebble, whose play Enron was a big hit in 2009, says of Wade: ‘Her works are as powerfully constructed and lustrous as a diamond. Nobody of our generation has taught me more about combining formal control with spirited innovation. She has those qualities of a great writer – humility, intelligence and a rare ability to listen.’