Every accolade that precedes Jade Franks’s one-woman show is technically accurate. Eat the Rich (but maybe not me mates x) won the Scotsman’s Fringe First, the Holden Street Theatres Edinburgh Award, and a sold-out London season at Soho Theatre. Margot Robbie saw it and was moved to praise.
Reviewing it honestly required a deliberate manoeuvre: imagining the story as the work of a writer other than its performer. Franks is performing her own autobiography – working-class Liverpudlian earns a Cambridge place, secretly cleans to survive, navigates the transaction of belonging – and that invites a protective reluctance in audiences and critics alike, where criticising the show risks looking like an attack on the person.
Franks knows this. A character tells her she uses humour as a shield; she agrees, immediately – a disarming moment of self-awareness that earns considerable goodwill.
Where the show transcends its obvious antecedents – Pygmalion, Educating Rita – is in its refusal of the male-sponsor model. Eliza needed Higgins; Rita needed Frank. Franks needed neither, reaching Cambridge on her own merits blended with a calculated dose of deception.
The show’s sharpest argument arrives at the ending: her ruse uncovered, her posh friends extend tolerance rather than acceptance. For those of us who have spent decades arguing that tolerance is merely forbearance while acceptance brings belonging, that landing cuts exactly as intended. The discomfort lingers.
Franks inhabits the space like a fish in a correctly-sized tank – arriving in activewear, she could pass for Sporty Spice at a Cambridge matriculation, and the movement work flows organically through the storytelling. Tilly, Milly, and Billy are designed to blur – three variants of the same posh type, their interchangeability the point.
Kristina and Laura were meant to be distinct, but they weren’t – not to this audience member. Both left little trace in the memory, their differences swallowed by pace.
Pace is the show’s most significant liability. Franks appears to take one enormous breath at the top and monologue for the full hour without pausing to inhale – relentless in a way that compounds both the Scouse accent and the density of British cultural reference.
“Everyone knows about David Cameron and the pig,” she says at one point. In Adelaide, almost nobody did.
When Sue Townsend’s The Queen and I made its Australian debut in Melbourne, the same phenomenon occurred: a work laser-calibrated for British cultural knowledge landed in a room missing half the frequencies. Some jokes in Eat the Rich found one or two laughs where a London audience would have been rolling, and the relentless pace allowed no time to catch up.
I was not the right audience for Eat the Rich, and that candour belongs in the record. The ambition is genuine, the craft is real, and the political argument is more nuanced than the title suggests. But theatre that loses a portion of its audience to accent, pace, and cultural specificity is not yet the universal piece its accolades imply.
The discomfort lands – just not always where Franks aimed it.
Eat the Rich (but maybe not me mates x)
The Studio at Holden Street Theatres, 32 – 34 Holden Street, Hindmarsh (Adelaide)
Performance: Saturday 28 February 2026 (1.00pm)
Season continues to 22 March 2026
Bookings: www.adelaidefringe.com.au
For more information, visit: www.holdenstreettheatres.com for details.
Image: Jade Franks in Eat the Rich (but maybe not me mates x)
Review: Daniel G. Taylor