Posh

Laura Wade's new play is highly topical: it is about the sense of entitlement to power of a privileged, wealthy, public school and Oxbridge elite. But while I'm glad to see the Royal Court confronting the supposedly taboo subject of class, the play occasionally overstates its case and raises issues of dramatic probability.

It deals with an exclusive Oxford undergraduate dining club, the Riot, named after an 18th century rakehell. (Any relevance to the Bullingdon is, of course, coincidental.) Meeting in the private room of a rural gastropub, the club's aims are clear: to get as bloated and "chateaued" as possible and to trash the premises. On this particular evening problems arise: three of them are vying for the club presidency, the 10-bird roast is one fowl short and a prostitute they've hired is summarily banished. Undeterred, they wreak revenge on the landlord with violent consequences.

Wade hits a number of nails on the head. She pins down the rage the club's members feel that their country has been stolen from them. She harpoons the masonic nature of much of English life in which self-perpetuating elites offer each other lifelong protection. Yet Wade also suggests that, when the chips are down, the Darwinian instinct for survival triumphs over the comradely ethos. All this is vividly portrayed and applicable to current politics. But the play suffers from showing all 10 members of her fictional club as total shits: for the sake of good drama, one wishes at least one of them displayed some moral qualm about their actions.

And, when it comes to the climax, plausibility flies out of the window: since the landlord's daughter is a partial witness to their behaviour, one feels they would not escape legal sanctions quite so lightly.

Lyndsey Turner's otherwise excellent production is also wrong on one point of detail: no visitor to the kind of high-Tory London club that frames the action would be admitted without a tie. But Turner orchestrates the group activity – punctuated by close-harmony songs – well, and allows individuals to emerge: David Dawson, so good in Comedians, lends a gay poet a distinctively sharp profile, Leo Bill is suitably reptilian as the club's most outspoken member and Henry Lloyd-Hughes impresses as a wealthy Greek who aims to be more English than the English. Daniel Ryan as the landlord, alternately patronised and abused, and Simon Shepherd as a velvet-smooth Tory MP, are also spot on.

But, while I endorse Wade's attitudes her play admits no shades of grey. What she has to say is eminently worth hearing, especially as the election looms. But her argument would be even stronger if it admitted that, even within the ranks of the bluebloods, there were occasional spasms of doubt and decency.