GANGSTA BABY by CAMERON RAASDAL-MUNRO at The Hope Theatre 9 – 27 January 2024

‘a patchy production’ ★★ ½

There may be plays that are helped by lots and lots of scenes, and fractured time-lines, and switches between direct address and character dialogue. There may be an edgy nervous energy to shows like that. All too often, however, that sort of filmic writing is just incoherent. Unfortunately that’s the takeaway from Cameron Raasdal-Munro’s Gangsta Baby.

A rent-boy who specialises in public-school tough-nut role play reveals that he is actually a public schoolboy, thanks to the enormous treasure chest accumulated by his gangster father. He would appear to be functionally illiterate, and to have an attendance record of thirty percent or so, which means his dad must spend an awful lot keeping him in a selective school, but there it is. He spends lots of time with his trans friend Pete, who is wise and loving and a brilliant street-artist whose tag is Gangsta Baby. He spends lots of time with his gangster dad, which is less fun and seems to result in the murder of his acquaintances. This is unfortunate rather than devastating, but since they live in Hastings, it is apparently an easy thing to lug the corpses up onto the cliffs and lob them into the English Channel.

Cameron Raasdal-Munro plays Junior, the real gangster baby, and he works hard, but it is such a disjointed production that he can’t maintain any credible character development. He switches moods constantly, he is tough and needy, he has passages of quite poetic direct address, he comes at the role from a dozen different directions and never settles on any, but he has a lot of presence.

Julian Brett is Pete the street artist, and the scenes featuring Pete are the best things in the play. They are touching and convincing, and feel real. The best writing concerned a debate about the value of street art, and what constitutes authenticity. An evening eavesdropping on a conversation between these two taggers would have been more fun than the psycho-drama featuring a brutal father and a needy son that we are actually presented with.

This is a patchy production crying out for tauter direction and another draft, less tricksy scene shifts, and a focus on the good things there undoubtedly were, buried in the hub-bub. 

GANSTA BABY by Cameron Raasdal-Munro at The Hope Theatre 9 - 27 January 2024

Box Office https://www.thehopetheatre.com/productions/gangsta-baby/

director

RIKKI BEADLE-BLAIR MBE

Cast

Junior CAMERON RAASDAL-MUNRO

Pete JULIAN BRETT

Mitch NATHANIEL HORNE

Senior NICHOLAS CLARKE

Reviewed by Chris Lilly