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Eat the Rich (but maybe not me mates x)

4 stars

 

Meet Jade. Like many ambitious working class young women, Jade is too smart to stay where she is for long. As Scouse as a Ken Dodd joke and with attitude to match, after life in a call centre no longer appeals, Jade works her false eyelashes off and gets herself into Cambridge. 

 

The getting of wisdom that follows finds our Jade having a crash course in campus snobbery as she gets a job as a cleaner to subsidise her course fees, bags herself a dim but fit posh boy and is left with an imposter syndrome the size of the Mersey, despite being smarter than pretty much anyone else there. Only when she meets a kindred spirit on the train north does her real education begin. 

 

This brings us bang up to date in Jade Franks’ wisecracking solo play, brought to gloriously rude life by director Tatenda Shamiso for JFR Productions. 

 

Franks’ motor mouthed dynamo is a gobby descendent of Willy Russell’s Educating Rita or Shirley Valentine reinvented for today. The social mobility of her forebears may no longer be possible, but in what is clearly a personal story, Jade becomes a heroine of our time. 

 

Pleasance until 24 August, 2.15pm


The List, August 2025

 

Ends 

 

 

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