Tigers, Not Daughters (TND) is a company made up of Founder and Artistic Director, Mojola Akinyemi, and the Creative Producer Hannah Samuel-Ogbu. We met whilst at Cambridge Univerisity and have since produced a number of award-winning plays and festival-qualifying short films together.
This year, we will be making our debut at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe with Mojola's newest play Cara and Kelly are Best Friends Forever For Life.
As many of you will know, it's been a hard time for funding in the arts world, with emerging companies like ours finding increasing difficulty to cross the barriers of professional theatre-making. It is an absolute DREAM to have secured a place at Pleasance, but the Fringe is a costly endeavour, and we are relying on our community and wider networks to help us raise essential funds to take our show to Edinburgh this summer.
If the play, or our company's message resonates with you at all, please do consider donating to our crowdfund!
About the show
The play follows the eponymous protagonists Cara and Kelly through their trials and tribulations of being fourteen-year-old girls in the early 2010s. They’re in the prime of their lives! Kelly is smashing it on the netball team, Cara is making progress with her new crush, and they know that they’ll 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’ve never had to doubt each other before, start to question just how far they’re willing to go for their friendship.
Cara and Kelly are BFF4L is brave, genre-defying, and truly gets inside you, blending together elements of comedy, drama, and horror, throughout its 1-hour runtime. It uses elements of the our own experiences of being young Black girls going to majority white schools, and turns that isolation and trauma on its head. It asks the question, how were these children allowed to get away with these things? What were the structures that enabled that to take place? And has anything, truly, changed today?
About the company
TND's main goal has always been to create boundary pushing work that explores themes of identity, gender, and Blackness whilst dipping into the surreal. We seek audiences that have been traditionally underserved in the theatre space and reignite uncomfortable yet necessary conversations around social change.
Our debut play was ‘Great Mother’, by Mojola Akinyemi, which transferred to the National Student Drama Festival and played at the Leicester Curve Theatre. This play was also longlisted for the Bruntwood Playwriting Competition in 2022, and the Women’s Playwriting Competition in 2023. Since then, we have staged ‘imaginary natural beings’ at VAULTS Festival 2023, and Camden Fringe 2023. This received positive reviews, describing Akinyemi as having an “an impressive, playful grasp of how modern theatre can challenge as well as entertain” (⭑⭑⭑⭑ The Reviews Hub), and of TND being a “company to watch”.