Jasmine Silk
The arts is a totally fair, totally unbiased, meritocracy right? Right. Follow the career highs and lows of ‘Posh Actor’ and his friend Stephan, who is very distinctly not a posh actor – you can guess which one has the highs and which one has the lows.
This play by Theo Hristov is a funny, biting, and engaging story about the insidious class prejudice and commodification of privilege or lack thereof experienced by actors and writers. It is part sketch comedy and character comedy – both Oscar Nicholson and Theo Hristov are brilliant comic actors, able to bring to life a world of contrasting and hilarious characters – and part plot-driven drama. In their main parts as Posh Actor and Stephan, Nicholson and Hristov, balance the comedy by bringing to life a complex story of a friendship between two actors from vastly different backgrounds, with the hilariously oblivious Posh Actor unable to see how different his experience of the acting world is from his best friend Stephan’s experience.
The elements of satire are belly-laugh worthy – I greatly enjoy the fact that a man called Posh Actor went to a school called All-Male-Boarding-School – and they find the truth at the centre of the joke. It’s frustratingly not at all far fetched to see the easy ride that Posh Actor is given because of the chances the industry is willing to give him, the slack everyone is willing to cut him and the desire to see him succeed, take up more space, even working class spaces, whilst telling actors without the same support why they need to jump through more hoops before they can be given the same chances.
Exploring what happens when Stephan’s script finally gets off the ground but Posh Actor is cast in the role he wrote for himself, as a working class character, this is an interesting discussion of fairness and representation that opens a much needed conversation. There’s a lot going on; a substance posh people can use to working-class-ify themselves, the main plot, Saturday Night Live sketches, brilliant comedy adverts both before and during the show, so sometimes the quick shifting plots/sketches can be hard to follow. That said, they are all so much fun, and well targeted, that its just a couple steps off from being the well-oiled machine that I’m sure it will be as it goes onto subsequent runs.
The highlights are the sharp comedy and dark ironies; they are most impactful representations of an often two faced industry than denies having one rule for some and another for others. I feel the affect this has on Stephan could be taken further towards the end of the piece, as it’s always interesting to see what someone can do in a face of a system that is rigged against them, how you break that pattern.
Go and see this show at its next run at The Pleasance in early December for a proper giggle and a brilliant way to talk about the class gap in our industry – I can’t wait to see this show keep growing.
Recommended Drink: Stay down to earth, get a lager or indeed go the other way and get a fancy whisky so you can feel how Posh Actor does for a minute.
You can catch the company’s upcoming piece Migrant Class Hero at The Pleasance Theatre in London on December 5th at 17:15 and December 6th at 19:00 (60mins). Tickets are available through the Venue’s Online Box Office.
Jake Mace
Lamesha Ruddock
