Like “Chewing Gum,” which drew on an early-adult dalliance Coel had with Christianity, “I May Destroy You” is a semi-fictional portrait of the artist and her social world. This black woman cannot live, or create, in the margins. Coel treats sex as slapstick and desire as an embarrassment, and finds a freedom in abjection. Coel is an astonishingly inventive physical performer a cerebral clown, she brings to mind, in her wiriness, and her willingness to contort her angular face, both Lucille Ball and Kim Wayans. Tracey’s entrance into womanhood is a cringe comedy: dressed in nauseating tribal costume, she dances for a white paramour, the seduction a hilarious failure of grunts and flailing limbs. In 2015, she made “Chewing Gum,” a joyful series adapted from a one-woman play she wrote while in acting school, in which she portrayed Tracey Gordon, an awkward virgin fanatically attempting to shed her chastity. A prodigiously talented writer, director, showrunner, and actor, she has an anthropological interest in all kinds of physical congress, in what happens when one body encounters another. Many of us have been there.Ĭoel, who is thirty-two, was born to Ghanaian parents and grew up in East London public housing with her mother and sister. It will be a while before she can acknowledge that the image is a memory. Somehow, she meets her deadline, but the next day a reel of horrible action colonizes her brain: a man, sweating and panting, thrusting in a bathroom stall. ![]() Is the scene comedic? Then a temporal blackness: Arabella bolts awake at her writing desk, a gash on her forehead. Arabella dizzily claws her way to the door. At some point, the bar begins to disintegrate and blur. A late-night crew parties and shares a round of shots. ![]() She and an acquaintance drift to a place called Ego Death Bar. In the pilot of “I May Destroy You,” a mesmerizing twelve-episode series for HBO and BBC One, written and co-directed by the aggressively free-minded Michaela Coel, Arabella (Coel), a young East London writer who owes her book agents a draft, abandons her laptop and slips into the night-just for an hour. Who hasn’t been there? A deadline looms, but inspiration won’t come.
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