Posh Girls review – boarding school besties on the couch

Muscular writing is required to overcome the cliches of a two-hander set in therapy. Posh Girls may have swapped the analysts’ couch for a sofa in the waiting room, but actor-writer pair Harriet Chomley and Sophie Robertson don’t quite manage to wriggle out of the limitations of their show’s rather forced setup.

Posh Girls pitches itself as a satire of upper-class girlhood, full of careless flouncing, rounded vowels and ridiculous nicknames. When Alex (Chomley) and Hermione (Robertson) run into each other at their very expensive therapist’s, Alex’s offhand comment that her daddy owns the building gives a sense of scale to their wealth. But this is no eat-the-rich ridicule. Instead, this story of a fractured friendship peels away the fronts these 30-year-olds have put on for each other, revealing the traumatic challenges they have faced and the hole each one’s absence has left in the other’s life.

Robertson in Posh Girls. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

Best friends at boarding school, they haven’t spoken in more than a decade. Hermione is guarded, recoiling at Alex’s probing questions about what she is doing in therapy. But the dark story that unravels, which illuminates the atrocities of boys and the cruelty of girls, makes Alex’s cluelessness hard to believe. At times it is as if these characters don’t know their own history until they reach it in the script.

Despite a few instances of furious overacting, the pair are good fun to watch together. Chomley’s deadpans are particularly entertaining. They quickly fall into leaping through their shared history, with Steve Waddington’s direction shunting them between the waiting room and their private school days, the pace slowed with regular blackouts. These jumps in time fill out the backstories, but the performances don’t shift much between the two. By flitting back and forth in answer to any questions raised, the script leaves very little unsaid.

A kind heart is lodged at this play’s centre. It wants to remind you to check in on your friends, to look out for and believe them. Because the world can be harsh, even to posh girls.

• At the King’s Head theatre, London, until 2 February