THE VIRGINS

Soho Theatre

★★★

“The writer has this gossipy girl talk just right and it’s exquisite”

Virginity, and the loss thereof, is a big money game.

Miriam Battye’s playful script initially lowers the stakes when sweet 16-year-old pals Jess and Chloe convene in the bathroom ahead of their big night out at Lizard Lounge.

The plan is simple, pull a boy then back home sans conquests for chicken dippers and a sleepover.

No reason to be scared. Boys are, after all, “just us, flattened out”.

But the arrival of Anya (Zoe Armer) changes everything. She’s in the year above Jess (Ella Bruccoleri) and Chloe (Anushka Chakravarti) when such gradations matter. Also, she’s made the biggest leap of all and, get this, she’s had sex, actual sex.

The virginal duo becomes a trio with the arrival of perplexed Phoebe (adorable scene stealer Molly Hewitt-Richards) and they all have many questions for Anya – and even more reservations.

Rosie Elnile’s set is split in two, the bathroom on the left and on the right the living room. This is where Chloe’s drippy brother Joel (Ragevan Vasan) is hanging out with cool-as-they-come gym buddy and dullard Mel (Alec Boaden) playing video games.

More on them later, but for now, the mere presence of boys in the house and the hint that Jess may have a crush on her bestie’s dweeb bro adds immediate tension.

Anya changes the rules of the game: Boys in the living room. Let’s get to work, girls. These days we can have it all, no consequences.

In Battye’s twinkling play these bathroom scenes are a joy and a highlight. At one point the girls are all crammed in the bath, as if this is their life raft on a sea of hormones, confusion, shame and uncertainty. The three innocents stared doe-eyed at Anya and each must figure out if losing the big V is a big thing, a small thing, nothing at all or a necessary evil.

The writer has this gossipy girl talk just right and it’s exquisite.

In contrast, what we find in the living room is an absence of anything remotely resembling a boy. Boys don’t talk like girls – they banter, the belittle, they boast – but Joel and Mel’s rare and gnomic utterances are dead on arrival.

The drama is entirely uninterested in the plausibility of the jock and the spineless milksop as friends and Mel’s mini info dump about why modern girls are to blame for modern boys is spurious and inert.

Perhaps Battye is making a point about boys as objects, as alien creatures. But the half and half staging suggests otherwise. On one side, we have natter and nuance, on the other, lumpen lads soaking up real estate.

That is one letdown. The other comes with director Jaz Woodcock-Stewart’s curious pacing. The whole thing is an elongated 85 minutes but could have been a swift and much funnier 65. There are enough comedy smash cuts to move it into the territory of screwball sex comedy – but the director clearly pines for Pinter.

When the girls take over the living room, they suffer from the same torpor, and the pacing never recovers. Yes, there are darker elements at play here, and painful confessions, but they are low-key and strangely lost.

There has been much hype about this play, selling it as a kind of bawdy romp for Gen Z. Battye means to say something meaningful about sex and identity and for that – and for the laughs – she deserves all the plaudits.

But the play is strangely hurried in the key moments and painfully slow elsewhere, making for a night that is as unbalanced as teetering Phoebe on vodka and lemonade.

THE VIRGINS

Soho Theatre

Reviewed on 5th February 2026

by Giles Broadbent

Photography by Camilla Greenwell

THE VIRGINS

★★★★

“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.

Tag Archives: Soho Theatre

THE VIRGINS

★★★

Soho Theatre

THE VIRGINS

Soho Theatre

★★★

“The writer has this gossipy girl talk just right and it’s exquisite”