Laura Wade’s Posh shines a harsh light on the ugliness of Oxbridge elitism and privilege, taking the audience out to dinner with a fictionalised version of the Bullingdon Club. First staged in 2010, and made famous by the 2014 film adaptation, The Riot Club, it has now found a temporary home at the Corpus Playroom.

Why did you choose Posh?

Anna Jennings: It’s so modern, and deals with issues which are still so prevalent, which is why it’s so important that we are having this dialogue and performing plays like this. Also, although the cast is primarily male, the women in the play are really interesting – we didn’t want to make it a play just about misogyny, but there is a massive undercurrent of that, which is another really important issue which the play takes on.

Do you think the play has a particular resonance, being performed in Cambridge?

Anna: Definitely – although the Bullingdon Club is obviously an Oxford institution, we very much treated the Riot Club as an Oxbridge drinking society. There are obviously problems with elitism [in Cambridge], and problems with access, and the play helps to highlight that.

Were there any particular challenges associated with it? What have you found difficult about the play?

Anna: It’s an ensemble piece, it’s these ten guys, and so much of it relies on the group dynamic. It’s really hard to make that spontaneous, and make it feel right. We’ve been doing in-character improvisation, like playing Cards of Humanity, to try and get the responses to feel ‘true’ and give these characters more substance.

Seth Kruger (Alistair): There’s a lot of non-verbal acting which goes on, so the group building stuff is important.

Leo Benedict (Hugo): It’s such collaborative dialogue; we’re all jumping over each other. Say with an Oscar Wilde play, most of it is duologues or soliloquies, so it’s really easy to rattle off your lines, whereas with this there can be five lines going on at once.

How have you found it to play these rather repellent characters?

Seth: I only ever get cast as repellent characters.

Anna: There may be some type-casting going on.

Dan Sanderson (Guy): Because we were doing so much in-character work, there was a point when we found that we were making jokes that our characters might have said, and the boundaries between the actor and the character got kind of blurred.

Jonah Surkes (Toby): There’s a lot of swearing in the play, and I’d never really sworn before – it’s great, my vocabulary has really expanded.

Is the play still equally relevant, given that David Cameron isn’t the prime minister anymore?

Anna: It was written at a very specific point in time with the ‘boys club’ of Cameron and co, but it’s a problem which stretches beyond that specific group. It’s an interesting time to be putting it on, given that Cameron is gone, but the Cabinet is still very dominated by people who went to Oxbridge and it seems like we’re just waiting for the next lot to rise up.

Leo: In a way the play has contributed to the decline of this kind of culture because the Bullingdon’s been going on for years, but membership’s now down to about five or six. Cambridge is slowly getting more inclusive, and you do get more relaxed mixed-gender drinking societies now.

What does the Corpus Playroom bring as a setting?

Anna: It’s a massively claustrophobic space because it’s a square stage which isn’t raised. We want the audience to sit down and take part and laugh along with the dialogue, but gradually become repulsed by it. We want them to walk away questioning what they’ve watched.

Seth: There was a production a few years ago in the ADC Theatre and that stage is a frame – you’re looking at the play from a distance, whereas ours will be much closer. You’ll be able to smell us – and that’s so important, that it isn’t glamorized. The film was too pretty and too constructed. If people didn’t like the film they should see the play because they’re different.

Jonah: And people who liked the film should see the play too!

Ben Martineau (James): I have a feeling it’s going to be a tough thing to watch in Corpus, not in a bad way –  just because the play is quite full on and in-your-face. It doesn’t pull punches. It’s as if Laura Wade has made a list of things which would be offensive, and tried to fit them all in.

A Guardian reviewer criticised the play, saying that it “admits no shades of grey”. Do you think that’s true?

Anna: With this production we’re trying to make it clear that these characters are individuals who do have redeemable features. It is hard because at times the play does slip into stereotypes and we’ve been trying to avoid that and get the nuances. We want to make the Riot Club, at least initially, attractive and engaging, so that as it shifts, the audience is left feeling complicit.

Leo: To start with you find the dialogue entertaining, and then there’s this beautifully gradual transition and you end up asking: ‘How did I get here?’ That’s what makes it such good writing.

'Posh' is on at the Corpus Playroom, 18th-22nd October at 7pm. There is no interval.