This rousing monologue from actor Jade Franks has been a stonking hit this Fringe, and it’s not hard to see why. It’s an enthusiastically told fish-out-of-water story based on working-class Liverpudlian Franks’s - dare I say it - Legally Blonde-esque experience of going to study at Cambridge. You sense she’s probably taken a few liberties with a narrative that isn’t entirely watertight. But it is, nonetheless, a thoroughly winning hour.
Working in a Liverpool call centre, the young Franks is piqued by an encounter with a testy posh customer who assumes she’s thick – so she decides she’ll go to Cambridge, crafts a banging statement, and then boom, off she goes.
Clad in falsies and tight gymware, Franks is an ebullient hurricane, winning us to her side by sheer force of personality. I would say it feels like she lays her Eliza Doolittle credentials on a bit thick: the show implies she was going to spend her life working in a call centre until a random phone encounter led to her not only deciding to go to uni, but Cambridge to boot. I’d assume there’s probably a bit more to it than that.
A bit of artistic license is fine, and the show really comes into its own when she arrives in Cambridge and gets a job to supplement her studies (a big no no, and the fact ). The students she encounters are initially baffled by her, and she them: different accents, different approaches to money, very different ideas in what ‘going out’ involves (she dresses up, they dress down). What’s great about the show is that it’s actually nuanced: she is often savagely critical of Cambridge and the many, many (many, many) posh people who go there. But despite a lot of drama, she knuckled down and made friends with the posh people and stuck with Cambridge - it’s neither a vindication of elite education nor the story of one plucky Scouse girl taking on the system and winning, but rather the story of one woman’s determination to persist with - and enjoy! - a system that was clearly not tailored to somebody from her background.
The show ends with the suggestion that Franks did in fact find her tribe of more working class students and that really the plot of the show is a dramatisation of a difficult first term. But that’s not to say Franks lacks an insurrectionary streak: she's cowed by neither Cambridge nor its legion of toffs. But she reaches a pragmatic accommodation with them. Which is all to the good - after an hour in her delightful company, you’d be mortified to hear this had ended with her having a shit time.
