With beautiful long nail extensions, Jade Franks opens her solo show ‘Eat The Rich (but maybe not me mates x)’ as a call-centre worker. A child of working-class Liverpool, she jokes that she once had no idea what ‘Oxbridge’ meant, or what a Cambridge college was, until a customer on the phone explained it to her. Soon after, as someone who had always done well at school, she receives an offer from Cambridge. She heads there, arriving early and taking up a cleaning job. The irony is sharp: she becomes both a student at one of Britain’s most privileged institutions and a cleaner of its student accommodation, which means the servant of her future classmates who are from the ruling class in this country. Even her nails become a subtle marker of hierarchy within the arcane world of Cambridge.

The striking part of Franks’ play is not simply its exposure of Britain’s class system; we know it exists, but the way both ends of the ladder, the privileged and the poor, appear to accept it as normal. The inequality of education, built on generational wealth, capitalism, and the myth of elite learning, feels entrenched. Even the man who phoned the call centre in the play instantly changed his tone when Franks’ character admitted she was ‘Oxbridge’. And with so many Prime Ministers who entrenched neoliberalism and widened inequality in this country, the myth of Oxbridge still holds power, despite the lectures, research, knowledge, and polished websites that loudly critique inequality while claiming to promote equal educational opportunities.

What emerges is a portrait of institutions trapped in their own contradictions. They present themselves as champions of equal opportunity, yet remain at the centre of the very system that perpetuates elitism and neoliberalism. Education and knowledge, in this sense, resemble a luxury good: less about learning itself than about identity, status, and access to elite social circles. Franks’ play is sharp, funny, and quietly devastating in showing how deeply this system has us all caught.

‘Eat the Rich (but maybe not me mates x)‘ has finished its Fringe run