Margaret Thanos’ production of Laura Wade’s 2010 play POSH is an achievement of ambitious extravagance, beginning as a magnificent satire of Old-World entitlement and tumbling quickly into a Dionysian horror. The story centers on the activities of the Riot Club, an informal society of aristocratic young students at Oxford (based on the real-life Bullingdon club) as they host a dinner on the outskirts of London at a pub. Their plan is one of destruction under the premise of superiority and tradition. Being heirs to great fortunes, they believe that, through virtue of their blood, they may drunkenly obliterate and destroy the room they’ve hired, as many good old dead members of successive meetings of the Riot Club have done. The play uses this premise to examine the psyche of that most revolting and obscenely entitled type of man: the young and dumb and moneyed white aristocrat. They trap each other in rituals of insecurity, each seeking to humiliate the other members of the club while still maintaining a tenuously superior attitude to an outside world they depend entirely on, in this case, their bemused and bumbling publican host. It is this tension which propels the play through its three-hour run time.
The characters from the beginning are trapped in their identities. Despite all the club members acting in cliché British upper-class camp homoeroticism, the gay members are singled out and ruthlessly mocked. One Greek member is continually bullied for his country’s outstanding foreign debt, and a particularly meek member provides a communal punching bag for all the others. The characters pick at the outstanding traits of each other, themselves acting in insecurity over their shortcomings. Insecurity is at the core of the construction of themselves and the club. The club engineers such a destructive night due to their own perceptions of how their festivities will match up to previous ones. Many characters use the night as an opportunity to prove themselves capable of wielding power and influence, yet this is ultimately the boys’ undoing, as they face up to forces which do not kowtow to their entitled antics.
Thanos’ Production is made exceptional for its use of its limited space and restrictions on set changes within The Old Fitz Theatre’s small stage. The prevailing atmosphere is one of claustrophobia and indeed imprisonment, which, too, reflects on the identities of the characters. The unchanging set decoration is an intelligent representation of the fundamentally protean stasis within societal order that the play critiques. While appearances change, those in power remain in power. The costuming by Aloma Barnes is subtle, with small characteristic variations on an essentially completely uniformed coat-and-tailed cast for the Club Members, stressing their antique attitudes and shabby private-school boy manners.
The actors were all at the top of their game. Especially impressive were the performances of Christian Byers as the perfectly perfidious and repulsive Alistair Ryle, and Charles Mayer as Conservative MP Jeremy, doubling as an apparition of the club’s founder, Lord Ryott. Scarlett Water’s no-shit escort, Charlie, was also magnificently performed, being perhaps the only character in the play who returned to the men what they gave out.
There were some small downsides. The runtime is perhaps not warranted for the scope of the play and owes in part to several plotlines which remained incomplete. However, none of this significantly detracted from the fantastic experience of POSH at the Old Fitz.
