Eat the Rich (But Maybe Not Me Mates x) review – a class comedy grounded in cheeky charisma

Jade Franks in ‘Eat the Rich’ at Soho Theatre - (Marc Brenner)

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.