Directors are entitled to revise plays and cut them and this one, at three hours, is far too long. Cutting large parts of the final act, and substituting a much better and less wordy spectacle was a very clever idea in this production. But to censor Bianca's central, dying thought about women, so clearly related to the title of the play, is taking direct-orial freedom too far. Perhaps Ms Elliott objected to the implied misogyny, perhaps she thought it excessive, but what she has done seems to me to be a contemporary form of bowdlerising. 

Altogether, the production seems to have been free with the red pencil. It shows little respect for an audience that has come to listen to a Jacobean writer and to imagine it can't handle Jacobean language. For example, a greedy mother-in-law wants to go to the duke's banquet partly for the sweetmeats, or as her daughter-in-law says in the original text: "For some dry sucket or a colt in marchpane." In Elliott's production the line is: "For a stale French fancy or a sugar mouse." The new line may be more user-friendly but I object to being patronised by an over-free translation, and what sounded like an anachronistic hint of Mr Kipling. I question whether there were French fancies in Jacobean England. Otherwise, this is an outstanding production, full of real menace and a sense of tragic entrapment in the sorrows of human wickedness and weakness. 

Posh, by contrast, though well written, well produced and enjoyable, is extremely slight. The upper-class undergraduate members of the Riot Club meet for one of their dinners at a gastropub near Oxford, where they intend to get completely "chateaued" on carefully-chosen wine, fill up their sickbags, trash the place and think of something both original and awful to do. What they do is indeed bad but no more original than the behaviour of any drunken yob: they beat up the publican and grope his daughter. The question then is: what will happen to their brilliant future careers. Can Daddy fix it?

The dialogue is sharp and funny. I'm told by those who know that it does very closely resemble the speech patterns of Bullingdon types today. The playwright, Laura Wade, must have good contacts and a good ear. And while the Bullingdon argot is often irritating when not actually repellent, no one can mistake these ghastly undergraduates for fools. Although they are clever and well-educated, they are pettily cruel and somewhat emotionally stunted. The scene with a call girl whom they expect to service them all under the dining table is a clever portrayal of their sexual ineptitude.

However, bolted on to this successful drama is an unsuccessful moral. It emerges that the Riot Club isn't just a silly dining club for spoilt rich gits: it has a much more serious and sinister purpose. A former member, Lord Somebody, appears at the end like an Establishment deus ex machina to reveal that the club's real function is to preserve and promote the long-term political power of the upper classes and to keep the ghastly proles at bay. This is entirely unconvincing, both within the play's own terms and outside them. It just seems silly, and it reduces this work from a successful piece of theatre into an only half-successful piece of juvenilia. But if Posh fails almost completely to touch the darkness of great Jacobean tragedy, it is still good fun.

It was  mischievous of the Royal Court to stage Posh before the election. This was seen in some quarters as a right-on lefty attempt to cock a snook at the Conservatives. But with the former Bullingdon member David Cameron ensconced in 10 Downing Street, it might be both fair and commercial to give it another run, perhaps in the West End in the successful footsteps of Enron and Jerusalem.