Coel’s focus is set entirely on survivors, never exploiting, only observing and empathising. Its characters have range and varied responses to what happens to them, which is the real story here. However subsuming an experience sexual assault is, I May Destroy Youshows that nobody is only that experience. That balance is achieved through a focus on character. It explores the dehumanisation of sexual assault and dilemmas of contemporary sexual relationships – threesomes, apps, hook-ups, betrayals on various scales – posing questions without slamming down answers. There’s violence, but also love and deep friendship. It puts pain and trauma on screen alongside comedy and romance. I May Destroy You, airing on the BBC and HBO, is frank, full-hearted fiction inspired by true stories around sex, sexual consent and rape. Her second screen creation after acclaimed E4 comedy Chewing Gum is an issues drama so fluent and dynamic that it entertains while it provokes. It’d be inappropriate, wouldn’t it? How can art made from trauma entertain?Īsk Michaela Coel. Audiences might expect to come away better informed and energised for change, but not entertained. When that drama is also based on real-life suffering, the prospect of entertainment slides out of view.
When a drama comes prefixed by an issue (class-drama, race-drama, abuse-drama), audiences can inwardly brace for a lecture, suspicious that they’re about to be made to eat their metaphorical greens. This spoiler-free review is based on the first four episodes.
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