Posh, Pleasance Theatre Islington

Modern day Bacchae!

Yes yes yes!

Well. They'll have a helluva mountain to climb to beat that original Royal Court cast. Wow. What a perfectly glorious bunch they were.

They're not changing it. They're just using female actors. The text will remain exactly the same.

So the women will be playing the characters as written - i.e. as men? That seems entirely counterintuitive (this isn't Glenda Jackson as LEAR!) but it makes nominally better sense than if the characters themselves were changed to be women, which would make a nonsense of Laura Wade's text. But given that the play was written and (initially) directed by women, surely if this is what had been intended, they would have done it first time round? Seems totally unnecessary.

It's just like colour blind casting. Worked really well with Donmar Shakespeares. We still have a way to go to get equal numbers of men and women in good roles in theatre plays.....when we do have that perhaps you can come back with the "unnecessary" comment! It is just good actors playing good roles....they just happen to be women! And in a way it so is Glenda Jackson as Lear! 

They have a revolve. Who doesn't? I might get one for the living room one of these days, I'm starting to feel a bit left out.

And there was also the priceless moment when one of the gals threw her bike's keys, the other girl didn't catch them and they fell precisely in the revoleve's rail. Histerical laughters on and off stage, the show went on for five minutes and then they had to stop it and get out the keys before they destroyed the revolve. An instant classic.

There were some fine performances, especially Serena Jennings as Alistair, Verity Kirk as Ed and, my personal favourite, Sarah Thom as Jeremy/The Owner. The rest of the cast fluctuated between serviceable and too vague. The characters (apart from Rachel, the daughter/waitress) are still all male, this is not a Malvolia situation: they are all ladies in a tuxedo, like Weimar Republic's lesbians. Or, at least, they are women playing men most of the time, the direction is quite uncertain about this: they should really pick out a gender and stick to it for the whole time. Another let down was the trashing scene, they simply threw down some chairs. But, to be fair, there wasn't much to trash: the private room looks surprisingly like a mine, no wallpaper to tear down, no ornaments to smash, no glasses to break.

The real problem is that of all the plays this is the least suited for an all female cast, it deals too much with masculinity and casting women doesn't really offer a comment in this sense. Once I was talking with some friends and one said that she'd love to see an all female "Dead Poets Society", and other replied that they made one, it's "Mona Lisa Smile": Deat Poets is about many things, but one of them is masculinity and swapping pronouns is not enough to re-address the issue. Same for "Posh", it needed a massive rework to be effective in this new form.

It's a fantastic play and the second act works much better than the first one: the ten minutes after they call an ambulance are breathtaking. This production is not too bad, but it really needed a more focused direction and, probably, it wasn't the best play to experiment with genders in the first place.

Weirdly The Evening Standard gave it 4* but I'm pretty sure whomever reviewed it didn't actually see it as all they mention is it has a revolve

5* from The Independent.

The three 2* reviews surprise me. I thought this was well staged and brilliantly performed.