Bullingdon Club film to open just before Tory Conference

Joshi Herrman writes in the Evening Standard:

It’s almost as if someone is trying to get David Cameron, Boris Johnson and George Osborne’s backs up. First, Laura Wade’s acclaimed play, Posh, started its run at the Royal Court during the 2010 election campaign. 

Now, the film adaptation — The Riot Club — has released its barnstorming trailer during another election season, a year before the General Election and with a release date (September 12) set so that it will be showing in cinemas just before the senior Conservatives whose university lives it lampoons and denounces are gathering in Birmingham for their crucial party conference.

He goes on to describe the play on which the film is based:

Posh, by playwright Laura Wade, now 36, debuted on the Royal Court’s main stage in 2010, opening during the election campaign. Set in a country pub outside Oxford, where the exclusive Riot Club (read Bullingdon Club) are drinking port and eating a 10-bird roast, it was a critical success — nominated for Best New Play at both the Evening Standard Awards and Theatregoers’ Choice Awards in 2011. 

When director Lyndsey Turner brought it back in a bigger production at the Duke of York’s theatre (with a few cast changes), the Standard’s chief theatre critic, Henry Hitchings, described it as “a heady blend of timely satire and outrageous romp”, writing that: “Wade deftly skewers the sense of entitlement that swirls like a sickly perfume around a certain kind of upper-class thug. Her characters seem to have everything, yet whinge relentlessly.”