THE RIOT CLUB

The Riot Club, the big-screen adaptation of the stage play Posh.

 

 

Posh is about a tribe. And like the play, the film - renamed The Riot Club - takes us on a night out with a tiny, exclusive dining society at Oxford University, loosely inspired by the Bullingdon boys. They put on their bespoke tails and hold their termly dinner at a country pub with the express intent of trashing the room by the end of the evening and paying for the damage with a large wad of cash on the way out.

  
The play was born what feels like a long time ago now, in 2007, at the Royal Court Theatre; it started as a broader project investigating young people and privilege. The Royal Court is bang in the middle of Chelsea, but the people who live there weren't often represented on that stage - I wanted to know who the kids were that sat out on the Sloane Square theatre steps at night to meet their friends. What were their lives like, beyond the clichés? It felt like uncharted territory. 

Laura Wade its writer,  "when I began writing, we had a Labour government, but the "posh Tory" had started to reappear on the political landscape. We'd got used to the Conservative MP as being a grammar-school-kid-made-good - Thatcher, Heath and so on - but suddenly people like Cameron and Osborne began to emerge, and so too did those pictures of the Bullingdon Club.



 

"I was very interested in the tribalism of an exclusive dining society, and there was something about its modus operandi that worked dramatically (you can do whatever you like if you can afford to pay for the clean-up afterwards): it seemed a potent metaphor for how rich people can behave. I never thought of the characters as based on real people - it felt less interesting to go back in time and write about those particular individuals who were members of clubs in the Eighties. Instead I thought of the characters as being the men who might one day run the country, the leaders of the future, which I found chilling."

 

" That said, I wouldn't want anyone to think Poshor The Riot Club represent my thoughts on Oxford students or the university as an institution. I didn't go to Oxford, and even if I had I suspect I would have moved in very different circles. The boys in the film are a tiny, rarefied part of the university cosmos. They even put a figure on it: "We're 10 people out of 20,000. The top 10."



THE RIOT CLUB CAST