Grime MC and producer Jammz had no plans to enter theatre — until a single table reading at the Royal Court in London changed the trajectory of his career.

By 2018, Jammz was in his third or fourth year working professionally as a grime MC and producer. He was 27. As he recounts in his testimony to the Guardian, told to Lindesay Irvine, he "didn't have any aspirations in theatre" at the time.

The turning point came through Debris Stevenson, a good friend of his and the writer of Poet in da Corner, a play that premiered at the Royal Court in September 2018. Stevenson first asked Jammz to help her write one of the early drafts of a song for the show. After he delivered that work, she invited him to a table reading at the Royal Court to read the part of SS Vyper, a pirate radio DJ.

What happened next caught him off guard. The theatre's artistic director, Vicky Featherstone, told him: "You read it so well you may as well be in the play!"

Jammz assumed she was joking. She was not. "I thought she was joking, but the next week I was in rehearsal," he recalls.

The experience proved formative in ways he had not anticipated. In his account, Stevenson's play revealed that acting in a theatre can have a lot in common with MCing in a club — two performance disciplines that might appear worlds apart but share a performer's core instincts.

Just as significantly, the production marked a moment of institutional recognition for his genre. Grime, in Jammz's telling, "was ostracised but the Royal Court saw it as an art form — and made me a better MC." A theatre renowned for new writing did not treat the music as a novelty or a marketing hook; it treated it as a legitimate artistic language worthy of its stage.

That validation cut against the grain of how grime had often been received elsewhere. For an MC working in a genre frequently pushed to the margins, having one of Britain's leading new-writing theatres engage seriously with the form carried real weight — both for the culture and for his own practice as a writer and performer.

The exchange between the two worlds ran in both directions. The discipline of theatre work sharpened his craft as an MC, while his understanding of grime's delivery and energy fed a stage production rooted in that culture.

Jammz has since continued to build bridges between music and theatre. for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf, with music by Jammz, runs at the Yard theatre in London until 17 October — an engagement that traces a direct line back to the Royal Court rehearsal room he stumbled into in 2018.