Watching Chewing Gum Dreams in 2026 means watching two Michaela Coels at once: the electrifying talent she'd become, and the twenty-something still finding her voice. Theatre503's revival, the first UK staging since the original, is a genuinely lively way to spend an evening — even if meeting the play on its own 2012 terms occasionally asks more of it than the writing can quite deliver.

The solo play follows Tracey Gordon through her final days at school: friendships, a first crush, and the daily grind of being underestimated by everyone around her. Nobody bets on Tracey, least of all herself — she has learned to lower the bar before anyone else can do it for her. "I am smart enough to know I am nothing," she tells her crush Conor, and the line lands as flatly true rather than self-pitying: her peers have absorbed the same defeatism, chasing cheap thrills and disposable, chewing gum dreams because nothing sturdier has been offered to them.

Racism, domestic violence, socio-economic discrimination sit under almost every scene, and Coel's instinct to reach for comedy rather than solemnity around them is, for the most part, exactly what gives the play its charge — it's disarming, quick, and often very funny, and the audience laughed often and hard. Where it wobbles is in modulation: the jokes risk swamping the genuinely harsh realities Coel is trying to denounce. A handful of the harder moments- a pharmacist's casual cruelty, a peer’s menacing innuendo, a teacher’s insult all carry a similar comic pitch as the play's lighter beats, so they slide past a touch faster than they probably should.

It's a rough edge rather than a flaw that sinks the evening, and it's worth remembering this is a first play: Coel would go on to wield exactly this device, comedy as armour over trauma, with even sharper control in I May Destroy You. Seeing the earlier, less disciplined version of that same instinct is part of the pleasure of a revival like this — you're watching a voice mid-formation.

Lauryn Ajufo is a real find. As Tracey, she hits the liminal space where childhood and adulthood overlap without ever settling — a sassy, wisecracking minx chasing a boy's attention one moment, a squealing child the next when she gets it, and there’s real vulnerability and beaty in her delivery. She's most impressive multi-roling: nine other characters pass through her hands, from Fat Lesha, the school's entrepreneurial condom-and-morning-after-pill dealer, to an overworked teacher who has learned dismissiveness as a survival skill, each sketched fast, distinctly, and with remarkable physicality. Anthony Simpson-Pike's direction keeps the production moving with confidence and pace, aided by Theophilus O. Bailey's movement direction and Xana's soundscape of 2000s garage tracks. Yimei Zhao's set — stark concrete slabs— is unexpectedly poetic, and gives Tracey's world a real visual identity. This is a well-drilled, thoughtfully assembled production, and it shows in every department.

It hasn't aged entirely smoothly, though. The adolescent churn of joy and dread Tracey lives through is timeless enough, and the inequalities she navigates have, if anything, worsened since 2012. But the texture around her — 2000s garage, feature phones, a very particular register of school-bus banter — now reads as a period piece rather than a live wire, and the play's growing canon status sits a little oddly against material that was written to feel rough and immediate rather than enshrined.

None of that should put you off. Chewing Gum Dreams is a smart choice for a venue built around debut plays, and Ajufo's performance alone more than justifies the ticket. What's being revived isn't a flawless masterpiece, but it is a hugely promising first draft of a voice that would go on to say all this even better — and there's real pleasure in watching that talent take shape.

Chewing Gum Dreams plays at Theatre503 until 17th October.

★★★

Written by Chiara for Theatre and Tonic, September 2026.

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