My Uncle Is Not Pablo Escobar – Brixton House, London

Stereotypes about London’s Latinx community are well and truly subverted in heist caper-meets-identity politics piece My Uncle is Not Pablo Escobar.

My Uncle Is Not Pablo Escobar

If you are going to make space onstage for Latinx women in South East London, you might as well enjoy yourself. My Uncle is Not Pablo Escobar at Brixton House does exactly that. It frames politics within a heist caper that is fun, noisy, and unapologetic.

The plot centres on four Latinx and British-Latinx women targeting a multinational bank implicated in laundering cartel money. The reference point is the 2012 scandal involving HSBC and failures in anti-money-laundering controls. The show is less interested in procedural detail than in the human fallout. Who profits? Who pays? And who gets stereotyped or exploited in the process?

What follows is a tour through differing experiences of migration and identity. Precarious status sits alongside adoption. Incarceration is mentioned without melodrama. English rubs up against Spanish and Portuguese. The opening game lands well, capturing the push and pull of living between cultures. The audience quiz is similarly well-received.

The staging goes big. Scene titles are stamped up like a pulp thriller. A curtain of suspect transactions forms a backdrop to the action. Lighting (Roberto Esquenazi Alkabes) is bold and unapologetic. There is a fruit dance that knowingly plays with exoticism. The set (Tomás Palmer) is clever, going from flat to bank to British Museum in a moment. The tone shifts quickly but rarely feels confused.

It is, unmistakably, a love letter to South London’s Latinx community. It does not shy away from the harder edges of that experience. Nor does it pretend respectability politics will fix systemic problems. The heist device gives the anger somewhere to go.

The Energy Carries it Through

There are, as I said, minor rough edges. A few cues were hesitant on press night. Some lines slightly mistimed. The surtitles, offered in English, Spanish and Portuguese, occasionally roll back or get ahead of themselves and distract from the action. That said, the commitment to access does feel genuine.

Performance, energy and commitment are the production’s strongest assets. Cecilia Alfonso-Eaton has a sharp instinct for comedy. Timing, or even just posture, do much of the work. Yanexi Enriquez anchors the evening effectively. She gives the busier passages a centre of gravity. The ensemble operate with a clear sense of shared ownership.

Structurally, the piece occasionally strains under its own ambition. Several strands compete for attention. Exposition can arrive in dense bursts. Perhaps this is an effect of so many writers and co-creators (Elizabeth Alvarado, Valentina Andrade, Tommy Ross-Williams, Lucy Wray, Joana Nastari)? Yet the energy carries it through most of these moments. The audience remains with it.

What distinguishes the show is its refusal to reduce Latinx identity to shorthand. The title gestures toward stereotype, then pushes back against it. The characters are not symbols. They are contradictory, frustrated, funny and often tired.

The result is not a polished thriller in the conventional sense. It is something looser and more communal. It asks to be seen as both entertainment and intervention. On those terms, it largely succeeds. You leave aware of the structural critique, but also of the pleasure the company takes in telling their own stories.

Salterton Arts Review’s rating: 3.5/5

My Uncle is Not Pablo Escobar on until 3 May 2026. More info and tickets here.