EAT THE RICH (BUT MAYBE NOT ME MATES X)
Soho Theatre
★★★★
“sharp and funny”
After a smash-hit run at last summer’s Edinburgh Fringe, Eat the Rich (but maybe not me mates x) arrives at Soho Theatre with the confidence of a show that knows its audience. Jade Franks’ debut play is a brisk, 60-minute one-woman piece that takes a familiar premise — the working-class student parachuted into Oxbridge — and refreshes it with wit, warmth and a sharp eye for the contradictions of class mobility in contemporary Britain.
At its core, this is a classic fish-out-of-water story. Franks’ protagonist unexpectedly secures a place at Cambridge University and finds herself navigating the polished self-assurance of her upper-class peers: the Tillys, Millys and Jillys who move through the world as if it were designed expressly for them. She is by turns dazzled by their ease and quietly unnerved by it, but more devastated by their taste in music, casual dressing, and outright disdain for her native Liverpool. What keeps the piece feeling fresh, not just another piece of class confrontation, is Franks herself. Drawing heavily on her own experiences, the script is peppered with contemporary cultural references and delivered with a conversational charm that makes it feel as though she’s chatting to an audience of her mates (only half true, judging by the crowd the night I visit) rather than performing a polished monologue.
It is striking how little has changed. Alan Hollinghurst’s 1980s class drama The Line of Beauty, recently revived at the Almeida, explored the same entrenched hierarchies, albeit with added doses of gender and sexual politics. Franks’ modern-day account suggests that four decades on, the fault lines remain stubbornly intact. The broader political backdrop may be different, but the rules of belonging appear largely unchanged. It’s fitting that Eat the Rich’s director, Tatenda Shamiso, has assisted on Ryan Calais Cameron’s For Black Boys, bringing with him an ethos that theatre should be a broad church, centring marginalised voices.
There’s a pleasing frankness, fittingly, to the way Franks charts her character’s naivety, particularly when she takes a job as a cleaner. She leads a double life: rubbing shoulders with the landed gentry by day while scrubbing their toilets by night. The absurdity of this split existence is never laboured, but its emotional toll quietly accumulates. Things start to look up for Jade when a potential romantic interest appears in the form of Greg — fit, football-playing, and entirely untouched by hardship. But as time goes on, and she imagines how her life would change with him, it slowly dawns on her that the superficiality of what drew them together masks the underlying and irreconcilable gulf between their two worlds.
Though that may seem bleak, Eat the Rich is perfectly well balanced and more positive than pessimistic. There’s tentative hope for a future that feels on the brink of something transformative, even if its shape remains unclear. A fleeting but affecting encounter with a girl “even more northern” than her at the Freshers’ Fair blossoms into an easy intimacy, the relief of recognising yourself in someone else. It’s only through the clear-eyed observations of her sister, the outsider to the Cambridge bubble Jade has become immersed in, that the protagonist fully grasps how contrived, even performative, the whole affair can be.
In the programme notes, dramaturg Ellie Fulcher reveals that the play was first conceived after both she and Franks were made redundant, sustained by jokes that it would all be worth it once they were “big and famous”. That punchline now feels prophetic. With Eat the Rich picked up by Netflix, Franks joins the lineage of Fringe successes like Fleabag and Baby Reindeer. If this sharp and funny debut is anything to go by, she may well capture the mood of the nation next.
EAT THE RICH (BUT MAYBE NOT ME MATES X)
Soho Theatre
Reviewed on 15th January 2026
by Amber Woodward
Photography by Marc Brenner
