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.’

Born and brought up in Sheffield, Wade began writing plays while she was still in the sixth form of her state school. Her debut play, the semi-autobiographical Limbo, was produced at the Crucible Theatre in 1996. After university – not Oxbridge – she wrote for a children's theatre company, Playbox, and made her London debut at the tiny Finborough Theatre in 2003 with an adaptation of Young Emma, a novel by the Welsh poet WH Davies.

Her prolific output in her twenties, when she was for a time part of the Royal Court Young Writers Programme, included Breathing Corpses (2005), for which she won the Critics Circle Award for Most Promising Playwright, Colder Than Here (2005), Other Hands (2006), and a re-working of Alice in Wonderland, entitled Alice, which was produced at the Sheffield Crucible in 2010, the same year that Posh opened at the Royal Court Upstairs.

Since the Royal Court, there have been five professional productions of Posh in the UK, including one with an all-female cast at London's Pleasance Theatre in 2017, as well as a film version in 2014, adapted for the screen by Wade.

Themes

When Posh opened it was described in some quarters as a left-wing swipe at the moneyed Eton and Oxbridge types who were now running the country, an old-fashioned blast of class warfare. Wade herself, while accepting that it questioned the behaviour of such people when let off the leash, never intended the play to be ‘a call to arms.’

Wade's life partner, the actor Samuel West, an outspoken Labour supporter himself, was actually at Oxford at the same time as Cameron, Johnson and Osborne, and would almost certainly have disapproved of their drunken antics. So, too, was the critic Charles Spencer who wrote in the Daily Telegraph that the play ‘persuasively captures that off-putting sense of entitlement that so often emanates from those who have been to leading public schools… as well as their revolting snobbery, condescension, cruelty and violence.’

It also addresses the matter of their misogyny. The young men hire an escort and expect her to perform oral sex on them. When she refuses, they threaten to rape the pub landlord's daughter. Wade wanted to show that ‘the boys’ didn't know how to handle the escort's dissent because they hadn't spent enough formative time with women to really treat them as rounded human beings. ‘There is that kind of casual misogyny that underpins quite a lot of what they do,’ says Wade.

Influences

Laura Wade cites a stage version of The Railway Children in her hometown, Sheffield, featuring a real train, as the show that turned her on to the possibilities of live theatre. A shy, bookish child she was teased at school for ‘talking posh,’ with no Yorkshire accent.

Charlotte Keatley's 1985 award-winning play, My Mother Said I Never Should, which Wade studied at A Level, also affected her deeply.

Other playwrights she admires include Martin Crimp, with Wade mentioning that she returns to his plays repeatedly; Caryl Churchill due to her innovative use of play structure; Anthony Neilson and Simon Stephens. When asked which play she would most like to have written, Wade responds: ‘Crave by Sarah Kane, it's very beautiful. It's a play for voices but it's still theatrical, and it's so emotionally right somehow.’

Resources

• Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK by Simon Cuper, published by Profile Books, 2022
• The Class Ceiling: Why It Pays to be Privileged, published by Bristol University Press, 2020
• The Riot Club, 2014 film version of Posh, starring Sam Claflin, Max Irons and Douglas Booth
• Wade's plays are published by Oberon Books in the UK. However, a student edition of Posh, with commentary on the play and approaches to producing it, was recently published by Methuen.