Never bring a bag of grated mozzarella to a cheese-and-wine night. Don’t wear false eyelashes and heels on a casual night out. And if a fellow student owns an embossed leather Hermès notebook, that does not mean his name is “Hermes”. These are just a few of the endless cultural faux pas an ordinary girl can make when she enters the upper echelons of Cambridge University. They are gleefully and astutely catalogued in Jade Franks’ Eat The Rich (But Maybe Not Me Mates x), a warm autobiographical account of leaving Liverpool for Oxbridge and discovering that raw intelligence is only one of many currencies that matter.
Written and performed by Franks as her debut one-woman show, Eat The Rich begins when she realises Cambridge might offer a way out of call-centre purgatory. She gets accepted, packs her bags, and almost immediately finds herself adrift among the Tillys, Millys and Jillys of the upper-class student body. Staged in the stripped-back Soho Theatre Upstairs, Franks uses a wheely office chair, a corded phone and an old-fashioned school desk crammed with costume changes to conjure a first term of freshers’ hell. A soundtrack of Dua Lipa’s “One Kiss” and thumping house music whisks us between corny Cambridge club nights and dorm room seduction by a Hugh Grant lookalike love interest.
Unaware of the bursary systems designed to support students like her, and flouting Oxbridge rules against term-time work, Franks takes a job… cleaning student halls (you can see where this is going: nowhere good). It’s a relatable act of financial necessity for those of us who did more service work at uni than anything remotely academic, and one that becomes the show’s reliable engine for tension and comedy.
In less confident hands, without glittery acrylic nails, this monologuing could slide into an easy “posh people are the bad guys” sermon. Instead, Franks blends hun culture, stand-up rhythms and Northern English specificity to support a far more persuasive argument: class is, as ever, rarely just about money, but about culture, access, and an inherited sense of belonging.
One of the show’s smartest moments comes courtesy of the droll student “Hermes”, who patiently explains the Oxbridge class hierarchy on Franks’ first day. It’s not just state versus private school: “You could go to a good state school and be more IN than someone from a cheap private school. You could be home-schooled by your cool artsy parents and be more IN than someone who went to an international school.” Class, Franks suggests, is a social ecosystem. It’s whether you’re the first person you know to go to university, or one of many. It’s the gulf between an artist who racks up credit card debt to get a play on its feet, as Franks did, and one who can call up a family friend to secure a stately home as a filming location, Emerald Fennell-style.
Fans of Jack Rooke’s Big Boys and Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag will enjoy this (Netflix has already backed Franks’ vision for a small screen adaptation), though Eat The Rich is a lighter and looser romp than either of those. It’s at its strongest outside of its serious moments, when Franks leans fully into comedy, firing off observations about what truly posh people do for fun or how it feels when a rich person talks about their parents’ library when your Mum is more of a Fifty Shades of Grey on the Kindle type of reader. In those moments, Franks’ cheeky charisma is a delight; it does the heavy lifting, and the show’s politics land without feeling didactic.
After all, you’re either lucky enough to be a Tilly, Milly or Jilly, for whom opportunities are laid out at your feet. Or you’re a Jade Franks, making your way on wit, resilience and hard work.
‘Eat the Rich (But Maybe Not Me Mates x) is on at Soho Theatre until 31 January; tickets here
