The self-flagellations of adolescence and its suddenly streaking hormones can make great fodder for comedy. Harry Enfield’s 13-year-old defined its comic pains for one generation. His Kevin is every bit matched by Michaela Coel’s exuberant and offensive Tracey. This revival of Coel’s 2012 debut proves her eternal relevance as a character: Black British and downtrodden, she is upstart, bully, trusty friend and a bewildered girl defined by class and race by her own schoolteacher. She is also horny and desperately infatuated with a white boy, Connor.
Beginning as a monologue performed by Coel herself, it is about friendship, sexual discovery and abuse, with Tracey telling us about everything from the girl in class who can lick her own vagina to her beautiful best friend with a controlling boyfriend 10 years her senior. The show went on to be adapted for the Channel 4 TV series Chewing Gum, which turned Coel’s one-woman polyphony into an ensemble of immensely colourful characters and fabulous comedy, but also lost some of its intensity and darkness.
Here it is again in its original, distilled form, vibrantly directed by Anthony Simpson-Pike. But like Tracey’s travels through time, this tiata fahodzi co-production is also a fascinating exercise in retrospection. You can trace Coel’s talent to this starting point – it spurts out of the script, like the characters’ sexual eruptions.
Lauryn Ajufo takes the character out of the shadow of the TV series to make Tracey her own – more pugnacious, earnestly schoolgirlish yet also streetwise, her youthful fears mixed with a child’s dead-eyed cruelty. This is a convincing showcase of Ajufo’s talent as an emerging actor.
Tracey’s offensive language often grates. The use of a disability slur and numerous references to fat girls in her class might be dated aspects of the script but more likely reveal the unlikable part of Tracey, a teenage girl learning to use language as a weapon, a cudgel with which to beat a threat.
Bits from the first series of the TV show can be sourced back, word for word, such as the brilliant scene in which Tracey tries to extract the morning-after pill from an intransigent pharmacist. As knowing as the show was on screen (like in Fleabag, also based on a one-woman stage show, Tracey confided directly to camera), there is a different kind of theatricality here. Yimei Zhao’s non-realist set has a distorted, dream-like quality and a tube suggesting the temporal portals through which Tracey rolls.
It is intelligent, inventive and still arresting. A blast from Coel’s teen past which feels nostalgic and fresh.
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At Theatre503, London, until 17 October
