babirye bukilwa - actor, poet, playwright
On debbie tucker green, on their new play at Theatre Peckham, and on the accident that changed their life.
Morning…
How’s it going? It seems like everyone is getting ‘pinged’ at the moment and having to isolate. If that’s affected you - and particularly if it has affected a show you were connected to - then I really feel for you, and hope you’re coping okay.
Welcome to the fourteenth issue of The Crush Bar, my fortnightly newsletter about theatre and the people that make it. If you haven’t subscribed yet, then now is your chance!
Below, you’ll find an interview with the actor and playwright babirye bukilwa (they style themself in lower-case like that, a la debbie tucker green), whose play …cake has just opened at Theatre Peckham (go see!). We had a lovely chat on the phone last week - about their life, their inspirations, and the accident that prompted them to start seriously writing plays a few years ago.
Before that, though, here’s your regular reminder to share this newsletter if you get a sec…
Oh, and I’ve also set up a Ko-fi tip-jar thing, so you can chuck me a few quid, should you feel so inclined. This newsletter takes about a day to put together, once you add everything up, and you lucky people get it for free. If you want to “buy me a coffee” to say thanks, then just hit the link below. Appreciate it.
Right. Here’s the interview. See you at the bottom for some bits, and indeed, bobs…
Interview: babirye bukilwa
In 2016, actor and artist babirye bukilwa had an accident. They were hit by a motorbike and spent some time in hospital. A nurse warned them that the consequences of their injury might be mental as well as physical, but even that did not prepare them for the depth of the depression that followed.
“If you are busy all the time, you can run from your demons, you can distract yourself from them,” bukilwa says. “But then if you are suddenly still and silent, it all catches up with you – all your childhood trauma, all that stuff about your parents – and I just fell into that. I was like: ‘Fuck, what am I doing with my life? Am I enjoying myself? Do I even like acting?’”
bukilwa’s salvation was a book – their friend and fellow actor Cherrelle Skeet gave them Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider – and the inspiration that gave them to start taking their own writing seriously. That book, says bukilwa, “made me realise that I had things to say, and that I had a right to say them.”
“Lists don’t pay my bills. Programming my work and producing my plays - that’s what supports me as an artist…”
And so, bukilwa started writing “properly”, and the result was …blackbird hour, their 60-minute-long debut play, set in the bedroom of a Black, Queer, working class teenage girl called Eshe. It was shortlisted for the 2020 Alfred Fagon Award, and for the 2019 Bruntwood Prize, and for the inaugural Women’s Prize For Playwriting in 2020.
“I find it difficult to talk about my work because I worry about sounding like a wanker,” bukilwa says. “But the thought that was going through my head when I wrote …blackbird hour was: do Black women have any safe spaces, and what happens when those spaces are no longer safe? And I just wanted to get all my thoughts out. Someone told me it reminded them of Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis, and that was such a big compliment because I think she writes beautifully.”
Despite picking up a collection of impressive accolades, though, …blackbird hour is yet to receive a full production, something bukilwa – a Black, Queer, working class femme themself – naturally finds frustrating.
“I think it is seen as cool at the moment for people and organisations to associate themselves with a writer of my intersections,” they say. “But although it is nice to be put on lists and stuff, lists don’t pay my bills. Programming my work and producing my plays – that’s what supports me as an artist.”
bukilwa was born in Homerton, London, in 1991. They grew up in a council house in Bethnal Green with their twin sister, their elder sister, and their mother, who arrived in the UK from Uganda several years before bukilwa was born.
“That was pre-gentrification, back when Bethnal Green was not a cool place to live,” bukilwa says. “Now, everyone and their mums want to live here.”
bukilwa’s mother was unwell for much of their early childhood, and so bukilwa and their sisters spent time in foster care, and at after-school clubs and Saturday schools “with a bunch of other random kids that needed some love and attention”.
Indirectly, bukilwa says, that experience helped inspire a love of performance in them, thanks to weekly after-school trips to the cinema, and annual club outings to local pantomimes. By the time they left high school with 12 A* GCSEs, bukilwa was determined to pursue acting professionally.
“All my teachers were like: ‘You want to act? Why?’,” bukilwa remembers. “But my mum was really supportive of me. I was really lucky, I think, to have a migrant parent who told me I should pursue whatever it was that made me happy, and who helped me do that.”
“My twin sister went to uni and I stayed at home, doing every retail job under the sun, slowly figuring it out…”
bukilwa completed a BTEC in Acting at Westminster Kingsway College in King’s Cross. They wanted to continue studying at drama school, but their circumstances changed, making that impossible.
“My birth mum passed away around then,” bukilwa explains. “My twin sister and I were living together in a council house, but we couldn’t both leave and go to university full-time, or we would lose the house. I said to her: ‘You go. I’ll figure it out.’ And that’s what happened. My twin sister went to uni and I stayed at home, doing every retail job under the sun, slowly figuring it out.”
Over the next ten years, bukilwa figured it out, job by job, in TV, film, radio and theatre. One of their first professional credits was in debbie tucker green’s truth and reconciliation at the Royal Court in 2011, and meeting the Olivier Award-winning playwright had a lasting impact on bukilwa.
“I was like: ‘Wow, who is the Black woman who has a flow that is so accessible to me?’”, bukilwa remembers. “She made me look at plays in way I’d never looked at them before. I used to think of plays as this White, elitist thing that I had to assimilate to. She made me realise they didn’t have to be, and that gave me so much confidence.”
“She was the first person I really put on a pedestal and admired,” bukilwa continues. “She was the first person I was a true fan of. I even asked her to read some of my writing. I’d never have that audacity now, but she did. As a young, Black, gay girl, I felt so empowered.”
bukilwa went on to appear in the BAFTA-winning Channel 4 film version of green’s play random, as well as several other short films, TV series, and stage productions – including Bijan Sheibani’s production of Romeo and Juliet for young audiences at the National Theatre, Nikolai Foster’s Leicester Curve production of Jonathan Harvey’s Beautiful Thing, and Nicola Wilson’s Plaques and Tangles at the Royal Court.
“It got to a point, when I was about 25, that I was just done trying to change who I am…”
Back then, bukilwa went by the name Vanessa Babirye – that’s the name that you read in the reviews – but they decided to change that around the same time they had the accident with the motorbike.
“Vanessa was the name my mum gave me to assimilate to whiteness,” bukilwa explains. “It got to a point, when I was about 25, that I was just done trying to change who I am. I wanted to reclaim my real name.”
It is for a similar reason, bukilwa explains, that they chose start stylising their name in lower-case, just like debbie tucker green does.
“On a practical level, I’m dyslexic, and not having to think about capital letters just makes things easier,” they say. “Then, on a deeper, spiritual level, I want my name to be free. I don’t want it to be the beginning or end of anything, because I am not the beginning or end of anything. My mum came before me, and her mum before her, and her mum before her. Capital letters are so formal, so square. I want to be a circle. See what I mean about sounding like a wanker in interviews?”
Since bukilwa’s accident in 2016 and subsequent depression, and since they dropped the name Vanessa and the capital letters that came with it, they have been busy. Really busy.
In 2017 they appeared in Ryan Craig’s Filthy Business at Hampstead Theatre, and in 2019 they appeared in Martin Crimp’s When We Have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other at the National Theatre, alongside Cate Blanchett. In 2020, they were a regular in TV drama We Hunt Together. Earlier this year, they were in the BBC Three pilot of Adjani Salmon’s comedy series Dreaming Whilst Black. And they have been writing a lot, too.
In addition to …blackbird hour, there have been three short audio dramas – water with Small Truth Theatre, mirrors with Popelei, and the forthcoming snow globe with Futures Theatre – and two full-length plays. the master’s house, a piece inspired by an Audre Lorde essay that was set to be staged by the National Youth Theatre this weekend, has been postponed due to Covid-19-related complications, but …cake opens at Theatre Peckham this week. It is, bukilwa explains, a prequel to …blackbird hour.
“Lots of people told me they weren’t happy with the ending to …blackbird hour,” they say. “They said I needed to rework it. I thought: ‘Fuck redoing the ending, I’m going back to the beginning.’ I wanted to write a play about Eshe and her mum, and how they got to where they are in …blackbird hour. It’s about home. It’s about family. It’s about roots. It’s about learning how to lie.”
It is the first time one of bukilwa’s plays has received a full production – and what has been particularly gratifying, they say, is that the entire creative team and crew are Black, from designer Debbie Duru to director malakaï sargeant.
“Often, I have been the only Black person in a rehearsal room full of lots of different Whiteness,” bukilwa explains. “That diversity of Whiteness is celebrated, whereas I am seen to represent all Blackness. That’s not the case with …cake. There’s lots of different types of Blackness in the room, and I don’t have to answer for all Black people. I don’t have to explain what slang words mean, either, and I don’t have to worry about someone potentially saying something racist. It’s so freeing.”
And what is next for bukilwa? A sequel to …blackbird hour, they say, and beyond that, who knows? Their career is currently a balance between acting, which pays the bills, and writing, which does not – yet. But that will not stop them putting pen to paper all the same.
“At the moment, I write plays for myself,” bukilwa says. “And I write them about the things I care about, like existence and love and co-dependence and gender. And I write them because it feels good.”
“The most helpful thing someone could do for me is…”
Never forget that I’m Black, Queer, working class and proud of all of those. Read up on those intersections and think if you really need to ask that question or ask for that labour.
Pay me what you would pay a mediocre white man with my experience and age. Then double it.
Let me pick my team.
“If you want to get an idea of what I do…”
…cake is at Theatre Peckham until August 7th. For more info, click here.
Bits and bobs, shouts and murmurs…
I interviewed Ola Ince for The Stage last week, ahead of her production of Romeo and Juliet opening at The Globe, and she was great.
I also chatted to fight director Kate Waters (AKA the legendary Kombat Kate) for Stage Directors UK’s blog. It was mainly about football - but also freelancing, and rehearsal rooms, and other stuff.
Amid all the mayhem and disappointment of shows being forced to close, a few absolutely super seasons have been announced, like…
This one from English Touring Theatre - feat. Lung Theatre, Pigfoot Theatre, and Nouveau Riche.
And this one from Leeds Playhouse - feat. Imitating The Dog, Phosphorous Theatre, and the legend that is Luke Barnes
And this one from The Wardrobe Ensemble - feat. their new show Winners, and Full Rogue’s brilliantly funny Wild Swimming.
Theo Bosanquet’s Big Interview with Adrian Lester - who is about to return to Hymn at the Almeida, but this time with a live audience! - is a really good read.
As is Mark Fisher’s Guardian interview with Enda Walsh, ahead of his new play Medicine opening at the Edinburgh International Festival.
Speaking of which, a bunch of shows - both online and in-person - got announced at the Edinburgh Fringe yesterday. It’s still nothing compared to most years, but at least it’s something. I’m most excited about Dirty Protest Theatre’s Double Drop.
Byeeeee…
Right. That’s your lot. Thanks for making it all the way to the bottom. Hope you have something to look forward to this weekend. Usually, I’d be heading off to Latitude to cover all the weird and wonderful things that are happening there, but not this year, alas. Instead, I’ll be playing a game of village cricket and taking my dog for a long walk, like the 65-year-old I secretly am inside.
Last thing: please give this a share if you can - forward it, like it, tweet about it, etc…
And if you can spare a few quid to help me keep The Crush Bar going, that’d be lovely.
If you need me, you know where to find me - just reply to this, or I’m @FergusMorgan on Twitter. See you in a fortnight.
Fergus x