Review: Cara and Kelly Are Best Friends Forever For Life (Soho Theatre)

Review by Isabel Benson

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Fresh from a sold-out Edinburgh Fringe run, Cara and Kelly Are Best Friends Forever For Life lands at Soho Theatre for a limited two-day run. Playwright Mojola Akinyemi and director Ilona Sell collaborate with producers Hannah Samuel-Ogbu (Tigers, Not Daughters) and Bronagh Leneghan, to deliver a show that’s as punchy as it is unsettling. Exploring race, xenophobia, and class, it exposes the subtle violences of adolescence and the complicity in racial harm, asking audiences to confront what coming of age in the UK really looks like.

At first glance, and at first entrance, Cara and Kelly Are Best Friends Forever For Life appears as a charming ode to chaotic girlhood that thrives on 2010s nostalgia; i.e. bedroom dance parties, ‘going on a mad one’, and the intoxicating intensity of a best-friend bond that feels world-ending and world-saving all at once. In many ways, it absolutely is that. The play opens with quick, witty candour, making us feel at ease as if we are watching the pilot of a sitcom (even the name suggests a light-heartedness). Tara Kelly’s set design is a perfectly pitched shrine to British schoolgirl adolescence; the energy is loud, messy and painfully recognisable, and Talulah Thomas’ nostalgic soundtrack accurately transports us back to our own teenage girl bedrooms.

However, this initial impression is far from the real deal. Instead, Akinyemi crafts something far more unsettling: a rigorous examination of race, privilege and the formative violence of growing up as a person of colour within the British school system. Crucially, this story is told not through the eyes of the victim, but through those of the perpetrators; Cara, fiery yet stubbornly damaged (played by Scarlett Stitt) and Kelly, more subtly self-indulgent (portrayed by Isobel Thom), the self-proclaimed ‘best friends forever for life.’ They are portrayed as happy-go-lucky besties until the new girl, Sumaya, becomes captain of the netball team in place of Kelly. 

It is a bold and deeply intentional choice to silence the POC experience while granting narrative authority to the two white protagonists. On the surface, this decision feels jarring, even unjust. Yet that discomfort becomes the point. This casting serves to portray the silence and subjectification faced by school children, like the silent, yet palpable character of Sumaya, Cara and Kelly’s fellow peer and designated enemy. Sumaya is a figure who occupies space without being permitted a voice, yet her silence is not absence; it is indictment. Indeed, when the drastic event - murder? - takes place, you could hear a pin drop within the audience's hush. We hate Cara and Kelly at this point and yearn for Sumaya's comeuppance.

From this unsettling premise, the production escalates with chilling precision. Director Ilona Sell’s vision to stage the piece with just two performers rather than a bustling classroom of voices intensifies the narrative. By stripping the world down to Cara and Kelly, the racism at play is no longer diffuse or crowd-driven; it becomes intimate and disturbingly candid. It causes us to understand that racism in school corridors is often quieter, more insidious, and more dangerous. It starts in the girls’ bedroom, with the ‘jokes’ framed as banter - she’s ‘so weird’ and ‘what a freak’ - the casual mispronunciations, and then the unbotheredness to learn pronunciations of names. Yet, the irony is razor sharp. In one breath, the girls laugh at the grotesque fantasy of Sumaya pulling a gun from her hijab, branding her a “terrorist” with reckless glee; in the next, they turn physical on one another, their own volatility laid bare. The violence they so easily imagine in her is, in fact, rooted within themselves. It is precisely this psychological inversion that makes the play so devastatingly effective - exposing a form of racism that hides behind adolescence, insecurity and the illusion of innocence.

And yet, perhaps Akinyemi’s most devastating yet important choice is that there is no retribution. Sumaya is supposedly killed (or adjacent) by Cara and Kelly, and the world does not meaningfully shift. In the aftermath, it is Cara who draws the final fracture line between them, spitting at Kelly, ‘you’re the one who dragged her in’ - a significant accusation which is chilling in the context that it is Kelly who flourishes the most. Her wealthy mother simply extracts her from consequence, moving her to a private school, and she ends up at Cambridge with a polished internship. Even Cara, visually coded through her puffer jacket, versus Kelly’s long blazer, remains fundamentally untouched by consequence, but not as flourishing as Kelly. Haiqing Liang, dramaturg, draws this contrast well. This absence of punishment is not a narrative flaw; it is Akinyemi’s deliberate critique. By resisting retribution but also creating a divide between the two girls, the play sharpens its commentary not only on race but also class, showing how the system protects those already positioned to succeed.

So much of the play’s success is indebted to Akinyemi’s compelling and emotive writing, as well as Sell’s direction, yet the story would not have had its racing impetus without the smashing performances of Scarlett Stitt and Isobel Thom. A tour de force, they even manage to make Cara and Kelly likeable at first so that our eventual disdain for them is all the more striking. It is the authenticity of their acting which prompts us to check ourselves, check the system which has brought us up and look inward rather than project blame on the two characters. 

Stitt brilliantly captures the adolescent ticks of an insecure teenager who believes she’s more mature than she is. Her projection, tonal and volume range, create dramatic tension, made all the more powerful by her honesty. Her monologue about death - feeling she could die at any moment due to someone else’s actions - is not only heavy with dramatic irony, but executed in a way which allows us to actually sympathise with Cara, as we are stuck in time in this moment, just focusing on Stitt’s every word. Kelly is the harder character to like. Portrayed as comfortable and wealthy, she has no real ‘struggle’, but Thom navigates this challenge with such raw unapology, leaning into Kelly’s spoilt attitude, but rounding her off with warmth due to how much she cares for and does everything for Cara. In fact, Stitt and Thom’s chemistry is perhaps the only saving grace of their characters. The way that the two actors bounce off one another, and the way Sell has encouraged this relationship, sparks a production brimming with emotional ferocity.

Ultimately, Cara and Kelly Are Best Friends Forever For Life at Soho Theatre treads a fine line between relatability and dislike, but by the end, it’s just harrowing. The contrast between the white girls’ trivial punishments - like missing a concert - and the very real harm they inflict on Sumaya highlights the toxicity of this dynamic. It also highlights the blame game: when personal situations are difficult, when money is tight, or when you feel your country has let you down, as in Cara’s case - with her broken family - immigrants and outsiders are made to carry the burden. The narrative’s conclusion ties into wider political commentaries: you start by thinking ‘wow, Cara and Kelly are so lucky to have each other’, a bond juxtaposed with Sumaya being labelled an outsider; however, by the end, you realise this isn’t even a friendship.

On a wider scale, the play represents a broken system that manipulates the girls themselves into thinking they understand their own girlhood, when in reality they are pawns of a racist system, exposing the insidious underbelly of the human condition. It’s uncomfortable, necessary, and unforgettable. Congratulations to all involved, including stage manager Eoin McCaul and technician Em Sparkes, but particularly Mojola Akinyemi; the future of this play is palpable and deserves great success.

Cara and Kelly Are Best Friends Forever For Life played for two nights only at Soho Theatre, February 13th and 14th

For more information and to learn about future performances you can follow the production team on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tigersnotdaughters