Zubayr Charles’ “Please, don’t call me moffie” receives standing ovations

Suidoosterfees 2025, Artscape ATKV Rep Theatre

Words by Nicole Shamira

All production images © Jeremeo Le Cordeur

Zubayr Charles and Anzio September // photgraphed by @jeremeo_lc

“Don’t hate the person; hate the act.”

Those words—dropped casually in a WhatsApp message—were the final push playwright–director Zubayr Charles needed. In the months that followed, Charles poured years of private hurt into a 50-minute theatrical gut-punch that refuses to whisper.

Please, don’t call me moffie (note the lower-case “moffie,” the reclaiming of a slur) makes its festival bow at Suidoosterfees, with two sold-out performances on 30 April and 4 May in the Artscape’s intimate ATKV Rep Theatre. The age restriction—No U/16 for nudity, strong language and violence—signals that the work pulls no punches.

A one-man, five-character exorcism

“After we first pitched the show at the 2023 Teksmark Festival, Anzio encouraged me to re-work the script as a one-man show. He wanted to challenge himself as an actor and to challenge me as both the writer and director,” Charles mentions. What began as an ensemble script became a solo tour de force for Anzio September.

The UCT-trained actor embodies five Coloured and queer men in their late twenties—Mushfeeq, Abdullah, Eesa, Zayn and Haroon—each written to short-circuit the tired media archetypes of “tragic gay,” “muscle gay” and “sassy sidekick.” September shape-shifts between them with nothing but a costume rail and a bruising emotional range, “demonstrating his virtuosity on stage”.

The spark: a viral video, a hateful feed

Charles, now 30 and raised in Bo-Kaap, traces the play’s genesis to a spike of online homophobia three years ago, when an influencer weaponised Islam to justify queerphobia. “It really hit me hard,” he tells Weekend Argus. “I realised that homophobia was far more prevalent, especially among people I knew personally”. Then came a “letter to a homophobe” on Instagram that modelled raw, public vulnerability. “I was so inspired by his words, and his honesty inspired me to also take action,” Charles recalls in a 10and5 interview.

Between Raymond Carver and Bo-Kaap

The title is a double entendre. First, it nods to Carver’s existential short-story collection ‘Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?’ —a reminder that all five characters in this play are also “struggling with their position in the world as they inch toward 30”. Second, it’s a direct challenge to the Afrikaans slur “moffie,” still flung at queer bodies from school playgrounds to various community courtyards. Charles doesn’t preach; he dissects language, letting each syllable land like a bruise the audience can feel.

Faith, masculinity and the mathematics of survival

The narrative detonates when the each of the five characters watch a viral clip of a brutal homophobic assault “in an unnamed Arab country.” The line “Al Lutiyah Muharama fie al Islam (to be a deviant [queer] is forbidden in Islam)” rings out—note there is no Arabic word for “queer”—and the play slides into a fever chart of memory tackling themes of bullying, toxic masculinity, and mental health. “I want audiences to leave the theatre understanding that everyone deserves compassion and respect, and that they should not be ostracised nor oppressed because of their sexual orientation,” Charles says.

Staging the rupture

Aside from putting his UCT Master’s in Creative Writing (cum laude degree) to good use, Charles proves himself to be a force to reckon with in theatre making too, spearheading the shows costumes, and curating the sound and lighting with assistance from Oral Williams and Cayla Feucht.

As September morphs between each of the five characters, changing costume from a cleverly placed washing line, the static white noise of the radio sound cue is layered with Britney Spears, psy trance, and the Islamic call-to-prayer among others.

Thus, underscoring Charles’ point on humans and their identity. “I love that we get to play around with different sounds, lighting and costumes through the different characters. We as human beings are multi-faceted; we cannot box what makes us who we are. With that, each character represents a different extended version of me.” The result is an immersive pressure cooker that feels larger than its 50-minute running time.

A duo to remember

Zubayr Charles and Anzio September are both names you do not want to forget. This formidable theatre duo, who affectionately refer to each other as “creative muses”, are set to take Cape Town’s theatre scene by storm with their next project titled ‘this bra’s a psycho’—a psychological crime thriller and traditional cat-and-mouse tale that tackles the rape revenge genre from a queer and Cape Coloured perspective. The show also stars James Stoffberg in the titular character, and the official run begins at Artscape, Arena: 28 July – 2 August.

Why this story matters

Cape Town’s theatre ecology rarely centres Coloured queer narratives, particularly from characters who stem from Muslim backgrounds; rarer still are stories that hold both faith and queerness without choosing sides. ‘Please, don’t call me moffie’ does precisely that. It offers no neat resolutions, only the radical act of naming pain aloud—and insisting on compassion in its aftermath.

With two festival dates already at capacity—and whispers of a longer run later this year—Charles’ play announces itself as essential viewing. And in the playwright and director’s own words, “To all the little boys who were constantly bullied, made fun of, labeled ‘different’, experienced years of trauma, never fit in anywhere, and felt less than for being misfits—Anzio and I dedicate this show to you.”