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There’s a cavernous emotional void at the centre of ‘Yvette’: it’s one that the 13-year-old protagonist of Urielle Klein-Mekongo’s solo show is trying to fill with the love and care she doesn’t get from the people around her. Klein-Mekongo transforms mic-taps and sung vocals into haunting UK garage sounds that play as she populates Yvette’s world. There’s Yvette’s unsympathetic churchgoing mother, yelling at her to peel yams. Her cackling, hyper-sexual teenage friends. And the ‘uncle’ who takes the time to find out who Yvette really is, then brutally exploits her loneliness.
Among Klein-Mekongo’s imagined cast of caricatures, the one that feels realest is Yvette. She’s childishly proud of her Hello Kitty underwear and her Pokemon-themed raps, and dances with a painful mix of gawkiness and total commitment. The nostalgic ’90s sounds and teenage cringe moments give ‘Yvette’ a kind of lightness but really, it’s horrendously sad. Yvette’s got an impossible amount weighing on her 13-year-old shoulders: struggles at school, her Christian mother’s disappointment, the pressure to have sex, and most of all the playground colourism which casts ‘lighties’ as more desirable.
Just when things feel unbearable, the story shifts abruptly into a beautiful final sung section, where Yvette finds her inner queen. I just wish the show had more about how she got there. It sort of throws all this horrendous stuff out there and leaves it to hang, without having the space to address it.
Still, it’s an eye-opening reminder that although they might share the same kitschy dress sense and bottomless capacity for embarrassment, some teenage girls have it much, much harder than others.