Let's Talk Theatre Again #9: A Theatre in the Classroom Journey with Zubayr Charles

From The Battered Housewives' Club 

Zubayr Charles is a writer and English teacher at the Good Hope Seminary Girls’ High School in Cape Town. Naturally, he became good friends with the author of Cultsha Kennis after we met him at the David Kramer Masterclasses in 2019 and discovered his affinity for Bo-Kaap. In the current South African climate where gender-based violence is addressed as a second pandemic after the Covid-19 pandemic, as per the recent address by SA President Cyril Ramaphosa, Zubayr’s playwriting is support of the victims of abuse is widely significant. Read more below! 

Cultsha Kennis: Congratulations on completing your first semester with your MA in Creative Writing at UCT. Tell us more about your program, and the novel you’re writing.

ZC: Shukran! Well the programme is structured between two years. For the first year, writers complete a compulsory workshop with South African author Imraan Coovadia, and thereafter writers have to choose three other modules that we feel would help improve our writing. In the second year of the programme, which will commence in 2021, Inshallah, writers complete a supervised mentorship in which we have to submit a thesis which consists of written piece of work (a novel, collection of short stories or poetry).

ZC: At the beginning of this year, I was enrolled into two classes: the workshop, and a directed reading. For the workshop, I and eight other writers had to submit pieces of writing each week, and then we had to critique each other’s work. It was difficult in the beginning because I couldn’t get myself to write and submit short stories, neither non-fictional short pieces. When I started the course I had already written three short stories, a collection of poetry based on the gentrification of Bo-Kaap, a play called The Battered Housewives’ Club. I had completed about 60% of a novel. I was highly excited to start, but mentally and emotionally, I couldn’t get myself to write. Because I was experiencing a heartbreak at the time, all I wanted to do was write poetry – it sounds more cool and glamorous than it actually was! But eventually I got over my slump, and I could start working on my short story anthology again.

ZC: As for the second semester, I’ve enrolled to another directing reading, but I’m hoping to complete a module on poetry writing, and the playwriting workshop with UCT’s drama department. 

From The Battered Housewives' Club 

Cultsha Kennis: The Battered Housewives’ Club was centred around gender-based violence and women empowerment. Do these themes have any special meaning for you?

ZC: For years, I watched my mother suffer in an emotionally abusive relationship, and I would always tell myself I would never want to experience a toxic relationship – then, between the ages of seventeen to nineteen, ironically, I was trapped in an emotionally abusive relationship. Fast-forward, a few years later, I experienced another toxic relationship, and then I kept thinking to myself, “If I, a man, could experience such toxicity, what must my teenage learners be going through? What must women be going through?” I could never compare my own experiences with manipulation and gaslighting to gender-based violence, but a fire was lit inside me. I kept thinking about my own experiences as a teenager, so I felt like I needed to warn all the girls at my school about what they could face in this world – specifically emotional abuse. I didn’t want them to make the same mistakes that I did. It’s so easy to identify physical and verbal abuse, but we often don’t even know that we are being emotionally abused. I felt like I needed to somehow end the cycle. I initially envisioned The Battered Housewives Club as a short story, but I felt the message would be delivered better on stage.

ZC: The play was showcased on a Friday night, and, once the play was over, I cried for two days straight! I was not prepared for the emotions that would occur after the play. So many people, specifically women, came up to me and shared their experiences. Years ago, someone told me this story, and I based one of the characters on what she had said, and after this person watched the play, she said that I inspired her to leave her abusive marriage – I couldn’t believe it! I didn’t think that my work would touch the hearts of so many individuals. I still get emotional thinking about the whole experience. 

Zubayr with the cast of The Battered Housewives' Club

Cultsha Kennis: What do you do with your learners at drama club? Does any of your drama club classroom lessons come from the English curriculum?

ZC: The English Home Language curriculum is divided into many different subsets. One of those subsets is literature, and one of the genres of literature that I teach is drama. In the subject of English, we focus more on the literary aspects of the dramas that we study for the year, but the drama 


club, however, is my extra-curricular activity at my school and this is where the learners and I focus on the performance and practicality of drama.

ZC: In my first year of co-ordinating the drama club, we focused a lot on improvisation. Each week I would give the learners a random scene to enact, and because many of them are highly comical and overly dramatic, we would always end up laughing – it was a lot of fun in the beginning. Then, I had a book of South African short stories, many set in the Apartheid era, so we would convert the short stories into plays, but my learners didn’t enjoy it – I guess they couldn’t relate. So, I decided to write my own play – something that my teenage learners could relate to.

ZC: Ultimately, the drama club is both learner and teacher centred: all learners have to audition before entering the club, we complete many fun exercises to improve their acting, and I often get them to go out of their comfort zones. 

Zubayr with David Kramer and The Masterclass participants.
Photo taken by The Baxter Theatre

Cultsha Kennis: You’ve also completed the How To Make A Musical Masterclass with David Kramer at the Baxter Theatre in July 2019. Take us through some of the highlights of this course, what you’ve learnt from David Kramer and how you intend on using this knowledge in theatre in the future.

 

ZC: The biggest thing I’ve learnt from the Masterclass with David Kramer, and I know it might sound like a cliché, was to learn from your mistakes. I often watched David Kramer and Taliep Petersen’s productions as a child on DVD, and District 6 the Musical is one of my favourite plays of all time. So, to hear David critique his own work was mind-blowing. As we learned from David, all hit musicals have a set structure, and they didn’t initially follow those formulae. As time progressed, David said that that he and Taliep learned from their mistakes, and the more musicals they produced, the more they improved their writing and style. I entered the Masterclass already having written my first Jukebox musical, The Battered Housewives’ Club, so I know which areas I’ll improve on for my next production. I’ll always be grateful to have been taught by David Kramer.

From The Battered Housewives' Club

Cultsha Kennis: Some of your writing shared on social media shows your deep affiliation to Bo-Kaap in Cape Town. Tell us what makes Bo-Kaap such a special place.

ZC: I’ve spent twenty-four years of my life living in Bo-Kaap, so I’m naturally biased when I say this is the best community in Cape Town. People like to associate the community for the colourful houses, cultural cooking and a place of social gathering during the December festivals, but this community 

means so much more than that. I feel I could never explain what makes Bo-Kaap so special – all I can say it’s a place I call home. 

ZC: A lot has changed since I was child, and I first started noticing this when I first began studying, in 2014. Each day I would travel to university with public transport, and when the bus would drive past Woodstock and Salt River, I kept noticing the urbanisation of both areas. Then, one day when returning home, I realised that Bo-Kaap was changing too. There were hardly any children playing outside, many people were selling their homes, and the new neighbours were mostly foreign and unfriendly – ag the list goes on and on. I decided to write a poem called A Place Called Bo-Kaap in which I juxtaposed my childhood memories to what I currently saw around me. A few years later, everyone else started realising the same – our rates began increasing exponentially and most people couldn’t afford to live in Bo-Kaap anymore. So, I decided to release my poem on social media, and it went viral in the community. The more the community starting resisting gentrification, the more poetry I wrote to help enlighten others on our struggle. 

From The Battered Housewives' Club 

Cultsha Kennis: How has the coronavirus pandemic and subsequent lockdown affected your work? What lessons do you think the arts and theatre industries, and perhaps the national education departments, should take to the future in light of this?

ZC: Thinking about the Covid19 pandemic saddens me because in the first term my learners and I had been practising for our next play called Mercy Killing – a play based on mental health issues. My initial plan was to showcase our next production in September this year, but everything is up in the air now with the virus. I have three committed grade 12 students, and if we don’t get to complete this production this year, I’m not sure if I could recast their roles, as those characters I wrote specifically for them. Next year they will not be at our school, so I honestly don’t know what will happen to this production by then. As I’ve said, I try not to think about it. I want all my learners to do well with their academics, the script will still be there in the future.

ZC: As a writer, the lockdown has helped me focus more energy into my writing without the busyness of my everyday life. I’ve finished about four more short stories for my anthology, apart from Mercy Killing. I’ve started writing another play, and each day I add more to my novel.

ZC: As for the theatre industry, I wish I could give you a diplomatic answer and say that the pandemic has taught us many things, but I don’t think anyone could have imagined how negatively this would affect art and theatre. Ultimately, this pandemic has taught us the value of life, so I know that once this is all over, artists and creatives will present and showcase their best work – it is all very exciting.

See a previous Cultsha Kennis review of The Battered Housewives' Club: https://cultshakennis10.blogspot.com/2019/09/the-battered-housewives-club-written.html