Written by the Bruntwood and Women’s Prize Longlisted playwright Mojola Akinyemi, Cara and Kelly are Best Friends Forever For Life is a searing, darkly comic and quick-witted new play. This razor-sharp two-hander throws a spotlight on the frighteningly subtle, yet prevalent, racism still woven within lives and communities across the UK. Told through the eyes of two white teenage girls, this unflinching story explores the intensity of defining friendships, the casual cruelties of adolescent girlhood, and the fine line where loyalty turns into complicity. Both unsettling and darkly playful, it challenges adult audiences to question the slow, insidious rise of far-right ideology and racial violence in the UK.
It’s 2013: the era of the selfie, Charli XCX and Icona Pop’s I Love It blasting from every speaker, and X Factor winners One Direction dropping their long-awaited album—peak heartthrob hysteria. Cara and Kelly are 14 and in the prime of their lives – Kelly is acing it on the netball team, and Cara is certain that love is blossoming with her dream crush. Most importantly, they know they will be best friends forever. For life. But when things start to go wrong, they know exactly who to blame: a new face who changes everything. Things that once seemed so certain are no longer quite so clear. Cara and Kelly, who have never had to doubt each other before, begin to question how far they’re willing to go for their friendship.
Starring the award-winning Isobel Thom as Kelly and Scarlett Stitt as Cara, the show blends elements of comedy, drama, and horror. The production delves into bullying and the and the cognitive dissonance that arises with those in fierce denial of their own role as bullies– particularly based on racial prejudices often learnt from their parents, the internet, and the environment around them.In a deeply nuanced take, the audience—particularly those who are white—are invited to question their own complicity in the awfulness perpetuated by children. The show delivers an intentionally destabilising ride: one moment you’re laughing with the characters, the next you’re stunned into silence.
Racism does not only come from strangers shouting slurs in public. Sometimes it’s passing remarks at girly sleepovers, from the best friends and smiling faces we trusted. It examines more pervasive forms of racism – the kind that hides in in-jokes, microaggressions and silence – the show isn’t letting anyone off the hook. Drawing on the company’s own experiences of being young Black girls in majority-white schools, it turns lived trauma on its head and asks what it means to come of age in a country you feel has left you behind, whether that is true or not.
Mojola Akinyemi, Writer, comments, My main thing going into this play, and why it’s from the perspective of the perpetrators rather than the victim, was because I wanted to upend traditional expectations. It’s easy to feel sympathy, if anything it makes you feel better: you can’t see yourself as being part of the problem, because you tell yourself that those who are enabling the violence must be very different to you. Their lives, their thoughts, their actions must be entirely unlike your own. The play, by making the main characters so likeable, snarky, and entirely real, forces audiences to acknowledge that there is no great divide, and in turn, makes them to acknowledge their own complicity.
This is on for one night only at Omnibus Theatre and then goes to Edinburgh for a longer run.
26th July. 8.30pm.
Booking and full details: https://www.omnibus-clapham.org/cara-and-kelly-are-best-friends-forever-for-life/
