16 hours ago
10
Jade Franks was scrubbing loos while her peers were playing polo. A working-class student at Cambridge, living a double life as a cleaner alongside full-time studies, she has parlayed her experience into her winningly titled play Eat the Rich (But Maybe Not Me Mates x). An early, buzzy hit at the Edinburgh festival fringe, the comic skewering of the Oxbridge elite sold out its initial run, added extra shows and won multiple awards, including a sought-after Fringe First. With a London run and regional tour about to kick off, Eat the Rich now follows in the footsteps of Fleabag and Baby Reindeer in being developed for TV, with a bidding war seeing the show currently under development with Netflix and Adolescence director Philip Barantini’s indie company It’s All Made Up Productions. But Franks is a grafter, and she’s only just getting started.
“I was always really ambitious,” says Franks, in her lush scouse accent, wearing thick cat-eye glasses. “I don’t think I was fully aware of class until it was stopping me from getting where I wanted.” Fictionalising her own life, Eat the Rich undercuts Franks’s effortless charm with rage at wealth inequality. Tracing her first term, the arcane rituals and alien environments get her into regular pickles simply because she doesn’t understand the state of play: dinners are suddenly conducted in Latin; money-oozing peers mimic her accent; and the grated cheddar she brings to a party is swiftly rejected from the cheese board.
Bubbling beneath the daily absurdities is Franks’s fear of her job being discovered, which breaks the university’s rule against working during term-time. In reality, it was only just before finals that Franks eventually learned about the bursaries that allow financially struggling students not to have to work alongside their studies. She had spent the last three years secretly employed as a cleaner, as in the show, as well as working for a punt boat tour guide company, hiding her face while out on the rivers for fear of being caught. “I wasn’t good enough to do the tours,” she laughs, “so I was in the cash office and moving the boats,” she splays her hands, showing off her long pointed, patterned acrylics, “with nails like these!”
Franks grew up in Wallasey, Wirral. None of her family were involved in theatre. “I’m just an attention seeker,” she deadpans. “I went to local drama classes in the church hall, while my mates were getting drunk in the park.” She got into drama school for sixth form, but even with the scholarship they offered, she couldn’t afford to go. After getting her A-levels, she applied again, getting acccepted by Lamda and later Rada, but once again couldn’t afford to take up the offers. “That lit the fire in me,” she says, “and that only became worse when I got to Cambridge.”
While the autobiographical show makes use of artistic licence, the classist encounters are all real. In the play, Franks’s sister comes down to visit and is refused from a college dinner by a sniffy professor for what she’s wearing. “That was completely true,” Franks says. Finding her email of complaint over the incident, Franks was taken aback by how apologetic her tone was. “It’s mad to see how much I’ve changed. Now, I wouldn’t stand for that. I’m so much more secure in myself about how you should be treated and why people are treating you that way.” How does her sister feel? “She’s thrilled she gets her own section,” Franks grins. “She was like: ‘Why did you change my name and not your name? I want everyone to know.’”
Taking inspiration from the razor-sharp work of Michaela Coel, and always knowing she wanted it to eventually be a TV show, Franks started developing Eat the Rich in her third year of uni. At that point, she wasn’t getting cast beyond small roles (“I’d never be a Juliet”), so she started working up her story as a standup set. Comedy felt like the right path for it.
“I wasn’t watering down any of the fury or the politics,” she says. “I was just sneaking it in the back door.” After graduating, she worked as an education assistant at London’s Royal Court theatre, where she met much of the Eat the Rich team: director Tatenda Shamiso, dramaturg Ellie Fulcher and producer Jasmyn Fisher-Ryner. Being made redundant after a change of artistic director “gave me a kick up the ass”, Franks says, to give her own show a go.
But she didn’t have the cash to just make it happen. “There’s no way to go to the fringe if you don’t have parents that can pay for it,” says Franks, “or savings! People have savings in their early 20s. Who?” She moved back home with her parents. “I had literally no money and my mental health was not great. I decided to go sober, which changed my life.”
Much of the final script was written in her head while invigilating student exams in the summer, keeping one eye on ensuring the kids weren’t cheating, then racing out of the hall to tap out ideas on her phone. “It was a period of my family being quite worried about me,” she says, “and then,” with the show’s success, “being like: Oh thank God.”
But the road was bumpy, and the show very nearly didn’t happen. The support of a private investor fell apart shortly before the fringe, and by then, Franks had put all the costs on a credit card. “So even if we didn’t do the show, it wouldn’t help, because I was already in loads of debt.” She and Shamiso made a video explaining the situation, and the response online was phenomenal, with some cash sent from old school friends and hefty amounts from generous (and rich) Cambridge pals, plus the support of working-class artists who championed the team – “before they even knew if the show was good yet!” – such as Big Boys comedian Jack Rooke, who Franks calls “a guardian angel of this industry”.
And yet. Despite Eat the Rich being a huge success at the fringe, already overcoming a multitude of barriers, it didn’t break even. When Franks had done the fringe as a student, she’d been “brainwashed by the mentality that we’re all gonna work ourselves to the bone, not get paid, and get the flu”. Her producer wouldn’t stand for that. The team paid themselves fairly and stayed in accommodation that meant they didn’t all have to share a bed, rat-king style. But because of the wild way theatre works, that meant no profit. Every step of the way, Franks kept coming up against the barriers preventing people like her from being able to make art that didn’t shred their health and require the safety blanket of family money. “Fringe should be a place where people can fail,” she says, “but you can’t afford to. I couldn’t afford to.”
Her desire to alter the unjust model of the industry spreads further than the shows she makes. Beyond Eat the Rich, Franks is a freelance creative consultant for theatre, drawing in more diverse audiences and making people feel welcome. Far from an add-on, this is essential, especially as theatre moves towards dynamic pricing, making it even harder for less well-off audiences to attend. TV deals are famously fickle, but if the Netflix series comes off, and she makes “loads of money”, Franks is determined to use her success to give others a leg-up. She is “overwhelmed and excited” about working with fellow scouser Barantini. “It was crazy,” she says of the post-fringe attention, and the masses of meetings she had with TV producers, “being able to choose. I think everyone understood why working with Phil would feel like home. But it’s early days.”
What would she do with the money, all being well? “At the moment, my outreach stuff on the West End is just me with my massive spreadsheet,” Franks says. “I’d love to set that up as a business and have a team. Get every commercial theatre to sign up to a scheme that I am,” – she laughs as she finds the right word – “landlord of, where you have to have an allocation of good seats for £10 that my team gets to the right people.” She has big ideas for the fringe, too: to make it a space where people can try, and fail, without fear of losing it all.
Having fought her way through the elite, inequality-ridden landscapes of Cambridge and UK theatre, the urge to do something about it all, to smash down the doors keeping some people out, is bone-deep. “I can’t change the system by doing a silly little one woman show,” Franks says. But that won’t stop her trying.
Eat the Rich (But Maybe Not Me Mates x) is at Soho theatre, London, 12 to 31 January; Liverpool Everyman, 16 to 18 April; and Bristol Old Vic, 28 April to 2 May.
