Raw Gods Takes the Care System to the Stage With Drill & Grime & Hands Hackney’s Care Leavers the Mic

RAW GODS comes from Hartley Lloyd-Pack, who has worked for Hackney Children and Young People’s Services since 2014 and is the son of the late Roger Lloyd-Pack. Roger gave Britain Trigger in Only Fools and Horses, a road sweeper who spent twenty-odd years calling Rodney “Dave”. Hartley’s concern is the other side of the same coin, the labels that stick to vulnerable young people and never get corrected. By merging frontline social care practice with a background in poetry and rap, he’s written a musical about the emotion, anger and hope behind them.

“On the 2nd December the building hosts something no Victorian programme could have predicted: a rap and drill musical about two best friends in the British care system.”

RAW DOG Creator, Hartley Lloyd-Pack

Hoxton Hall has worn many hats since it opened in 1863. It began as a Victorian saloon-style music hall, where audiences ate and drank through bills that included a performing Russian cat and learned canaries. It became a temperance mission, a Quaker-run adult school fighting poverty and now a community centre. The iron-railed balconies and small, high stage are still there and on the 2nd December the building hosts something no Victorian programme could have predicted: a Rap and Drill musical about two best friends in the British care system.

“Hartley’s concern is the labels that stick to vulnerable young people and never get corrected.”

Nkechi Simms

The story belongs to Sammy and Jay, teenage best friends bound by life in care. Born into lives where fight or flight is a daily event, they’ve built a bond that feels like family, because family isn’t always blood and they believe that music is the way out. Then social care splits them up, placing them hundreds of miles outside London for “safeguarding reasons” and the two boys run, from the chaos of their upbringing, from the police and their social workers and from every negative label society has stuck on them. The result is a reckless, humorous and deeply moving pursuit of happiness by people who feel they have nothing to lose. Willy Russell’s Blood Brothers showed British audiences how two boys pulled apart by forces bigger than themselves could break a theatre’s heart and RAW GODS pulls the same lever with a Drill beat.

“Family isn’t always blood.”

Dia Peters

That beat is the point. The original score, produced with Richard Day, Jamie Rodigan and Adiktive, blends Rap, Hip Hop, Drill, Grime and Gospel, with live instrumentalists and a six-strong choir of care leavers behind the cast. Hamilton proved a Rap score can carry a musical and RAW GODS asks what happens when the voices on stage have lived the story.

“Hamilton proved a rap score can carry a musical and RAW GODS asks what happens when the voices on stage have lived the story.”

Jaya Gordon-Moore

The cast could hardly be sharper. JayaHadADream, the Jamaican-Irish rapper from Cambridge, plays Jay. Born Jaya Gordon-Moore, she left a job teaching A-level criminology in 2023 to make music full time, broke out with “Twiggy”, then won Glastonbury’s 2024 Emerging Talent Competition, by her own estimate against some 8,000 other artists. This year she’s a MOBO nominee for Grime Artist of the Year. Nkechi Simms, whom you may know as Sienna in BBC’s PRU and Keziah in Top Boy, plays Chantelle and she comes with deep roots in the care leaver theatre world. Dia Peters, trained at Mountview and recently seen in Boyhood at the Pleasance, plays Sammy.

“England now has around 81,770 children in care, the highest figure since the 1980s.”

The people behind the scenes carry equal weight. Directing is Basheba “Bashiie” Baptiste, a care leaver who runs the theatre charity Care to Culture. Matthew Xia, the Olivier Award-winning director of Hey Duggee: The Live Theatre Show and artistic director of Actors Touring Company, has been consulting and Chris Sonnex, artistic director of Cardboard Citizens and a man who knows homelessness from the inside, provides dramaturgy. The project began as a short musical film produced by Fully Focused Productions, which Benjamin Zephaniah championed before his death. “I remember when it was just an idea in his head,” he said. “Now it’s here.”

“Music is where they can say what they really feel and imagine a different future.” Hartley Lloyd-Pack

The numbers behind the show are staggering. England now has around 81,770 children in care, the highest figure since the 1980s and in 2024 to 2025 some 4,610 care leavers faced homelessness. Hartley sees something else in the young people he works with. “I’ve seen how much humour, creativity and determination can exist alongside incredibly difficult circumstances,” he says, and this musical makes room for all of it.

“I’ll be in the room on the 2nd of December, hoping Sammy and Jay find their way back to each other.”

I’ll admit this one hit me. I was living independently by sixteen, drifting towards older, steadier people who kept me upright and I know a sliver of what it feels like when family is something you build for yourself. That’s why “family isn’t always blood” lands so hard and why I’ll be in the room on the 2nd of December, with the rest of Hackney, hoping Sammy and Jay find their way back to each other.

Booking Details:

RAW GODS is at Hoxton Hall, 130 Hoxton Street, London N1 6SH, on 2 December at 7pm.

Tickets start from £22.50 including booking fee and you can book at hoxtonhall.co.uk.

Follow @rawgodsmusical and @shprods_ for updates.