one4review | On 10, Aug 2026

MC Hammersmith sends out his butler to greet the 250 of us squeezed into Assembly 3.

His butler (Stuart Murphy) takes the reins of the room, hilariously betraying Hammersmith with things he’s said in passing that clearly weren’t meant to be passed on. He rattles off a series of punchlines and jokes, improvising playfully with the room as if he were an old friend.

His job is to prepare us for the frankly ludicrous talent waiting in the wings.

MC Hammersmith smashes onto the stage and destroys us with a freestyle rap that, to my uneducated ears, is as good as an actual track, backed by some dancing “birds”.

Hammersmith is wonderfully self-effacing about his peculiar brand of rap stardom, using a series of witticisms that play upon his middle-class upbringing. But in this show, he’s an orphan, found on the steps of the very building we’re sitting in, and he’s trying to find his real parents. The plot is almost panto, and the audience responds in kind.

Everyone loves it. Hammersmith manages to look after the entire room with a consent-based eye-contact system, allowing people to be drawn into the show at their own choosing.

He somehow creates a completely improvised 55-minute rap performance with zero lulls. That is wild. He is being presented with random objects and expected to rap about them instantly, yet somehow it’s when he makes mistakes that we discover he has another level. Yes, he is that good.

He catches everything thrown at him with wit, even when audience members somehow don’t know their favourite food or, in the case of a geography teacher, a capital city. How does this man do that?

His interplay with Murphy, the rest of the cast and the audience is consistently hilarious, with Hammersmith switching effortlessly to being the butt of the joke after roasting audience members in the most playful and skillful way imaginable.

That interplay takes the show beyond simply watching an extraordinarily talented and funny rapper demonstrate what he can do.

The audience naturally starts playing along, and you can see the mirth on Hammersmith’s face as they do. The story is light and silly, but it gives all this extraordinary improvisation just enough scaffolding to be a truly fun show.

You don’t come to Ice Ice Nepo Baby for intricate dramaturgy. You come to laugh and to watch someone repeatedly do something that appears impossible. Occasionally, Hammersmith seems as surprised as we are, joy filling his face as he fumbles, catches then completes another high-wire act of improvisation.

I heard people whispering about the speed of Hammersmith’s mind as we entered. As we left, they were talking about the skill of his rapping and just how funny the show was.

I have one word for you if you haven’t seen him: GO!

★★★★½

Reviewed by Stephen Sharp “Sharpie”
Assembly Studio 3
Until 30th August (not 12, 19 or 26)
15.05 (1 hour)