Review: Posh Girls, King’s Head Theatre
A featherweight satire that tells us rich girls have feelings tooSummary
Rating
Ok
Former best friends, Alex and Hermione, meet unexpectedly in their therapist’s waiting room. It is over a decade since they smoked and partied and bitched and gossiped at boarding school, and having lost touch during that time they are naturally anxious to present the appearance of success and fulfilment. But neither woman is successful or fulfilled, and as they wait for the late-running therapist they gradually open up, revisit the past and rekindle their friendship.
Harriet Chomley and Sophie Robertson, under the direction of Steve Waddington, play Alex and Hermione as the crudest of caricatures. They fling their arms about, waggle their hips, flick their hair and drawl. Every posh girl cliché is here: addiction, body image, want of parental affection, vacuity and neurosis. It’s all too obvious to be particularly funny, and although there are a few jokes that land, others have punchlines visible from space. If it’s a send-up of posh girls you’re after, Tara Palmer-Tomkinson and Paris Hilton did it first, and did it better.
Having encouraged us to laugh at these silly, unlikeable, two-dimensional characters, the play then invites us to sympathise with them. We learn about schoolgirl insecurities and rivalries, about the teenage trauma that led to adult addiction, and about the pain of infidelity. But the characters are so lightly-drawn, and the world in which they exist so farcical that it’s very hard to feel anything. One moment we’re expected to chortle about the therapist’s receptionist putting a patient in a headlock, the next moment to believe in Hermione baring her soul at AA. The strongest feeling I had was indignation when the story, almost inevitably, turned to sexual assault. Sexual assault is a terrible reality of life and as such it belongs on stage. But not as a cheap moment of emotional manipulation, as it is here.
The play is better when it flashes back to school days. This is a more believable universe, where Chomley and Robertson show us two boisterous friends with eccentricities, romantic dreams and a healthy curiosity about life, and particularly love. The quick changes, from present-day clothing to flashback school uniform, take place onstage, behind the sofa, while the two characters continue their dialogue. It works nicely, and the costumes are effective, with each woman’s distinctive style giving a clue as to her personality and the image she wishes to project.
The show is performed on a thrust stage, with a set that consists of a forward-facing sofa, with tables at either end. On one table is a pot plant, on the other a bowl of satsumas. Through no fault of our own (we were asked to move down by a front of house team that wanted to make space for latecomers), we ended up sitting in a side row towards the back of the stage. This meant that we were in line with the sofa, and behind most of the playing space. When Alex and Hermione were talking on the sofa, we had an excellent view of the pot plant. When they were moving around the space, most of their performance was directed downstage. Perhaps the performances and storyline would have been more engaging, had we seen more of the characters’ faces.
If the play has a moral, it seems to be that posh girls have feelings too. Sadly, it doesn’t quite succeed in making us care. Where it is more successful is in illustrating the intense and meaningful connection between teenage girl best friends, and making the case that once that’s lost there may never be anything quite like it again.
Written by: Harriet Chomley and Sophie Robertson
Directed by: Steve Waddington
Posh Girls has completed its current run at King’s Head Theatre.