THE interaction between performers and audience is at the heart of live theatre. If jokes fall flat it dulls the impact of the whole production, hence the canned laughter that became such a staple of dire televised comedies.

But it can be a much more subtle affair than laughter and tears, as we discovered at a production of Laura Wade’s play Posh, a thinly disguised dramatisation of the antics of the Oxford University Bullingdon Club, which includes the Prime Minister, Chancellor and London Mayor among its alumni.

While we went along in anticipation of experiencing righteous indignation over its portrayal of class, privilege, entitlement and boorish antics, what struck a raw nerve was the significant section of the audience who gave every indication they approved of it all.

Some were there to admire and, perchance, one day to emulate; or, at least, that’s how it felt to us. It was a real eye-opener into the shift in political and social attitudes in the five years since the play premiered.

Laura Wade is too good a playwright to make Posh simply a caricature and she has held fast to the fiction that the play, subsequently filmed as The Riot Club, is a work of fiction.

But the play’s genesis in 2010 when the Tories were ascending to power and the emergence three years earlier of the infamous photograph of the Bullingdon boys, including David Cameron and Boris Johnson, was an inescapable point of reference.

Indeed, whenever photos of the Bullingdons strutting in their colourful tail coat outfits (a snip at £3,500) have emerged copyright has been invoked to have them withdrawn. Most of the media images you now see are sketches or paintings drawn from the photos.

You would almost think Messrs Cameron, Osborne and Johnson were embarrassed or ashamed. Indeed, the latter admitted that period had been “a truly shameful vignette of almost superhuman undergraduate arrogance, toffishness and twittishness”.

Wade called her play Posh but a better title might have been Entitlement, as her characters show a near superhuman lack of self-awareness concerning their vile misogyny, arrogance and vandalism, believing that flashing copious amounts of cash can undo all damage done. There was an unverified newspaper claim that an actual Bullingdon ceremony in recent years involved making initiates burn a £50 note in front of a beggar. I thought that propagandist, but then I encountered the audience at this Fringe production and had second thoughts.

To be clear, the play is a fine piece of work, and the amateur production by a respected drama group from a school in the north-west of England, is well performed.

Sandbach School in Cheshire  has been at different times a private school, a publicly-funded grammar school, then a comprehensive, before becoming the first of the UK Government’s “free schools”.

These fifth and sixth-year youngsters may or may not be hoping to go to Oxbridge, but they gave this play their best shot. So neither they nor Wade can be criticised for the play or the production.
But something odd was going on in the audience. Edinburgh at Festival time is obviously not a typical Scottish audience, not least because of number of Oxbridge performers and visitors in town.

All have a view, all have an impact.

My best pal and I arrived prepared for indignation. Our wives tuned out almost immediately, finding the boyish, boorish misogyny simply uninteresting.

While I tried to give due attention to the performance and to the subtlety of the Wade play itself, my friend was simply bristling too much from the evident adulation of many in the audience behind us.

He gritted and clenched, and our wives were disengaged, bemused that misogyny would be box office. Having booked the tickets, I reflected on this rare failure. Good play, good production, bad audience was the conclusion.

But that is simplistic, for Oxbridge students around Edinburgh just now are entitled to their take.
Seeing the likes of Black Watch in fantastic and appropriate venues made our National Theatre accessible. I would love to have seen Laura Wade’s play in a different venue, say a Miners’ Welfare with an audience that would have shared my prejudices.                                                                                                                              

But it remains of interest that a play that sought to shame that sense of entitlement of an ruling elite, could soon be seen by a few as a route to achieving it.

Has our Overton window, to use the politics term for a shift in public opinion, moved so far so soon that the Bullingdon Boys are now mainstream?