Interview with the playwright, Laura Wade

Edited - read the whole interview on Guardian website.

Laura Wade: the girl in the Tories' soup
"I was the family alien. I was always putting on little shows."
Laura Wade likes research. She finds it helpful, up to a point. When she wrote her first play, Colder Than Here, which is about a dying woman who is planning her own funeral, she learned all about coffins, from paper to wicker to good old-fashioned oak. But on this score, her new play, Posh, was a trickier proposition: its subject is an all-male Oxbridge dining society of the kind to which David Cameron and George Osborne once so infamously belonged. "It wasn't as if I could gatecrash a dinner," she says. She had to fall back on interviews. "We talked to people who'd been in a club themselves or who'd had friends in one; we talked to older people who were still very much involved in the life of their old club and, I suspect, funding it. It was interesting.
"There is this cliched idea of poshness that crops up in television: you know, someone's posh cousin in a sitcom, Tim Nice But Dim. It's all a bit 'rah'. But as we went on, I realised it was important that the play's voices be modern, too. There are so many influences on the way people talk now." Her eyes widen. "Writing a tribe is fun. They have their own language, their own slang, they repeat it and it becomes part of the texture of the play. For a writer, that's thrilling. That's when my pen flies."
The award-winning Wade is known for the precision of her writing and you feel her deadly accuracy in every sentence, every phrase, of Posh….. as if … Brideshead Revisited meets Lord of the Flies: horrifying, compelling and yet blackly funny."They are quite entertaining," says Wade, in the manner of a fond zookeeper. "They're witty. They're clever. They have the verbal facility to follow an argument through to its end. This isn't a rugby-club dinner. The charge in the room is intellectual as well as physical."
Nor did she hold that photo – of Cameron and Osborne in their ridiculous Bullingdon Club suits – in her head as she wrote Posh. "I don't like writing with real people in mind. This is about a whole group of people. For me, it's a hypothesis: do these connections help you in later life? There's a sense [for the super privileged] of having to stick together in a world that doesn't want you or understand you any more."
Wade is not posh. She grew up in Sheffield, where her father worked for a computer company. "... I was rather a shy child, not a natural performer, but there was a performative edge to everything I did." Her school was discouraging when she suggested that drama might be her thing, so she arranged her own work experience at the Crucible theatre and it was there, at the age of 18, that her first play was staged, in its studio. After a drama degree at Bristol University, she began writing seriously, earning her keep with temp jobs during the day. "Temping was good. At the beginning of the week, I'd hate everyone. By the end of the week, there'd be all these characters; everyone had some sort of quirk." But she regards her move to London and her joining of the Royal Court's young writers programme as the real start of her career.. In 2005, when she was still only 27, her first and second plays ran simultaneously in London: her debut, Colder Than Here, at the Soho theatre, and her second, Breathing Corpses, at the Royal Court. They won her a Critics' Circle award for most promising playwright and an Olivier award nomination.