We sat down with playwright Mojola Akinyemi to chat about her new show, Cara and Kelly are Best Friends Forever For Life.

Selfies, sleepovers and silent complicity… Cara and Kelly are Best Friends Forever For Life is a darkly comic, razor-sharp two-hander from Bruntwood-longlisted writer Mojola Akinyemi. It’s 2013 and Cara and Kelly are 14—inseparable, unstoppable, and certain nothing can come between them. But when a new girl arrives, cracks form, loyalties shift, and the unspoken becomes impossible to ignore. Told from the viewpoint of the perpetrators, this gripping play explores girlhood, privilege, and the quiet rise of far-right ideologies in modern Britain.

This play is told from the perspective of two white teenage girls. Why was it important for you to centre the story around the perpetrators rather than the victim? 

I think it’s far more interesting to tell the story from the perpetrators, when thinking about what radicalises people into certain types of behaviour. No one likes to think of themselves as the villain, as a bad person who causes harm to other people, and it’s fascinating to explore how people rationalise their behaviour and actions, how harm can become self-defence when you twist things enough. By framing the play from the perspective of the perpetrators, we also implicate the audience, who see the events from their point of view.  

At first, the audience responds with warmth and laughter to the outrageous things they say and do. But by doing so, the audience has essentially sanctioned their behaviour for most of the play. After their actions cross a line, their jokes and digs, which were so funny before, are no longer things to laugh at. I’m making a point on audience complicity, white infantilisation, and cognitive dissonance. There’s a lot within this 1-hr play. 

Cara and Kelly… tackles racism in such a subtle, unsettling way. What inspired you to write about this particular form of harm – the kind that hides behind friendship and in-jokes? 

It’s far easier to excuse things when they are framed as jokes. I used the term ‘white infantilsiation’ earlier, which I’ll expand on. It’s a way of removing accountability from white children (and young adults), particularly when they are the aggressor, and is paired with the adultification of children of colour – in this case, Black children. In this scenario, white children who project violent, racist abuse are seen as too young to understand the consequence of their actions, that they are simply uneducated and misguided, and those who are subject to the abuse should be the ones to rise above it. The victim’s pain is dismissed, and in some cases, they are seen as egging on the abuse by being too vocal about its impact.  

This play highlights the danger of this position and shows the potential consequences of refusing to grasp the danger of these jokes – how they’re never really just jokes – and how you can’t project innocence onto people simply because they fit the bill of what you would presume to be harmless. By making the friendship real and tangible, and exploring the difficulties in their own lives, I’m also showing that those who cause harm aren’t these abstract beings, they are people we recognise in our daily lives, parts of which we can even see within ourselves. 

You’ve spoken about audiences feeling “comfortable” when only seeing the victim’s side. What do you hope white audiences feel walking out of this show? 

I’m interested in what makes a play provocative, what makes it visceral, how it reaches the point where it becomes confrontational. What is the point where the audience shifts from being a passive observer into being complicit, and can expect anything otherwise from the status of the audience member? 

In terms of what I want audience members to feel, I’m quite interested in theatre pedagogy, about the intersection between dramatic art and education, and a theatrical work can serve as an illuminative experience for the audience member. I’d love for it to be a launching pad for them to reconsider real life instances of their own complicity with regards to racial violence, and to prevent it being perpetuated again in the future. That’s why it’s so important for me to have the show tour regionally after our run, perhaps even in schools. These are the audiences that need to see this work. I purposefully didn’t set it in a specific geographical location (beyond the UK), as I wanted it to feel like this story could happen anywhere – which it could. 

2013 is such a specific time — why did you choose that era to set the play in, and how does it connect to the themes? 

I suppose I was thinking back to a time that was nostalgic for me. The music, the culture, the way young people used to speak. It’s familiar to me, and to many people in their twenties and early thirties. I was also interested in the earlier days of social media, back in the switch from Blackberries to iPhones, when BBM transitioned to iMessage, when not every teenager had a smartphone. Remember Facebook pokes? I think this was also a point where the far-right populism felt like it started to take hold in British politics. The push back against multiculturalism, the anti-refugee sentiment, UKIP beginning to gain traction, the establishment of Islamophobic hate groups.  

I feel like we have more language to talk about these issues now, but for me (perhaps because I was a child), it felt difficult explaining exactly why being a young Black teenager at that time felt so terrifying and isolating. This play combines both of these pillars to explore from the perspective of two white teenagers who have imbibed this growing sentiment, of what it feels like to come of age in a country you feel has left you behind, whether that is true, or not. 

If you could speak directly to your 14-year-old self, or someone who sees themselves in Kelly or Cara — what would you want to say? 

 There’s so much I’d want to say to my 14-year-old self that I think I’d get tongue-tied, and she’d get bored and walk away. I think to fourteen-year-old girls in general, I’d say something like: “kindness is cool, and you are important”. And they would definitely all laugh at me. I’d much rather have them watch the play instead. 

 Catch the show at  Pleasance Courtyard (Bunker 3) from Wednesday 30th July – Monday 25th August 2025 (not 18th) at 15:20