‘Chewing Gum Dreams’ revival hands the lead to Lauryn Ajufo, a decade after Michaela Coel’s breakout

A decade after Michaela Coel first walked onstage as Tracey Gordon in a 70-minute monologue about a Nigerian-British teenager losing her virginity in a Thamesmead tower block, the play that launched her career is returning to London. Variety reported on 6 July 2026 that Lauryn Ajufo, the British actress whose turn in the single-take kitchen drama Boiling Point earned her a British Independent Film Award nomination, will step into the role in the first major revival of Chewing Gum Dreams. The production, reported as upcoming rather than fully dated in Variety’s exclusive, marks a deliberate revisiting of a work that already sits inside the British theatrical canon at a relatively young age.

The choice of casting matters as much as the choice to revive. Chewing Gum Dreams first played at the Bush Theatre in 2012, before Coel had written I May Destroy You, before the BBC had greenlit anything close to it, and before the wider cultural apparatus understood what it was about to inherit. Bringing the play back now, with a performer whose own career has been built on the kind of high-pressure, ensemble-driven realism Coel helped legitimise, is a way of asking what the original actually contains — and whether it still travels.

A play that aged into its premise

The 2012 production was, in part, a piece of biographical autobiography. Tracey, raised in a housing estate by a Ghanaian mother and a white stepfather, navigates faith, sex, race and a deep, abiding appetite for sweets, with the evangelical certainty of a sixteen-year-old who has not yet met the wider world. Coel performed the role herself and won the Evening Standard Theatre Award for Most Promising Playwright in 2013. The play’s premise — a teenager mistaking evangelical Christianity for a sexuality it does not recognise — depended on its writer being both inside and outside the character, which is part of why it landed as something more than a coming-of-age monologue.

The revival, as Variety reports it, does not yet have full production credits or a venue in the public record beyond the casting announcement. What it does have is a lead who is plausibly cast against type. Ajufo’s reputation was built on contained, interior performance — Boiling Point, directed by Philip Barantini, was filmed in a single take inside a cramped restaurant kitchen, and her performance as a sous chef navigating a service that descends into chaos demonstrated a restraint the original Chewing Gum does not particularly invite. Asking that actor to play Tracey is a deliberate inversion: the production is signalling, at minimum, that this Tracey will not be played as a loose wire.

What a revival actually means

Revivals of new-writing plays within a decade of their premiere are unusual in British subsidised theatre, and the reasons tend to be either commercial (the work has currency, the audience will come) or institutional (a venue wants to claim a writer, a writer wants to claim their own lineage). Chewing Gum Dreams sits at the intersection of both. Coel has, since 2012, moved decisively out of the room the play describes — into I May Destroy You, into Black Earth Rising, into the BAFTA she won for writing in 2021 — and there is a case that her debut is more interesting now precisely because its author is no longer captive to it.

There is also a counter-case, which the trade press has not yet articulated but which the industry will feel: a play written by a twenty-five-year-old about a sixteen-year-old, performed by its author, may have been a record of a particular moment in a particular body in a particular room. Decoupling the role from Coel is not a neutral act. The revival either lets the play stand on its own — in which case the casting reads as confidence — or it forces a different kind of performance through it, in which case the casting reads as a corrective. Variety’s framing, which leans on the actress’s own BIFA nomination as the credential, suggests the production is going with confidence.

The economics of a Michaela Coel credit

Coel’s commercial standing has changed the texture of everything attached to her name. I May Destroy You was produced for BBC One and HBO in 2020, distributed internationally, and is now a fixture on undergraduate reading lists on race, trauma and form. She has spoken publicly, in her 2018 MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh Television Festival and elsewhere, about the economics of authorship in British television — about giving up her rights and then refusing to do so again — which has itself become part of the curriculum around her work. A revival of Chewing Gum Dreams does not enter a vacuum. It enters a small industry of citation, scholarship, and brand.

That changes what a revival costs and what it promises. The producers, the venue, the marketing, the ticket pricing, the press — all of it now has to clear a bar that did not exist in 2012, when the play ran at the Bush as part of the venue’s new-writing programme. Whether the revival is treated as a heritage staging, a capitalised commercial run, or a community-facing return-to-roots is a question the casting alone cannot answer. Variety’s exclusive does not yet say.

What is not yet known

The Variety report covers the casting and the basic premise of the revival. It does not name a venue, a director, a producer, or an opening date. It does not specify whether Coel herself is involved in any production capacity beyond the original authorship credit. It does not state the run length or whether the revival will tour beyond London. The thread also does not name other cast members, the creative team, or whether the production intends to update the script in any way.

This matters because the staging choices — even the most basic ones — will determine what the revival means. A reading at a fringe venue reads one way. A main-house transfer with a press night reads another. A co-production with a venue that serves the community Chewing Gum originally described reads a third. Until those details land, the only verifiable fact is that Ajufo will play Tracey, and that the play is coming back. The rest is the industry's to decide.

Desk note: Monexus has framed this revival as an actor-driven casting decision and a generational repositioning, rather than as a tribute. The trade press tends to frame any return to a Coel text as part of her canon; we have read it instead as a question about whether the text still travels without her inside it.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chewing_Gum_Dreams
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michaela_Coel