Pieter-Dirk Uys
MY new 2015 look at South Africa and the world around us, An Audience With Pieter-Dirk Eish!, has developed into an unexpected national assembly of my satirical cluster of characters, some who have been with me since the 1980s. While it has always been my aim to remind us where we come from, it is more of a necessity now to celebrate where we are going.
Does history repeat itself and turn tragedy into farce? Maybe on some minor levels of stupidity – thinking of the famed Gupta wedding fiasco and the Nkandla firepool gala. But looking at the characters and stories I have lined up, some old, so new, some borrowed, some blue, I don't really believe that history does repeat itself in South Africa. Here it just rhymes: from apartheid to tripatartite; from amandla to Nkandla!
The challenge of having 20 numbered boxes on the stage and remaining calm enough to throw myself at the mercy of the choices of every night's audience is a bit crazy. There is usually no democracy on my stage. There I am the Vladimir Putin of theatre. I know what I do; where I do it; how I do it, and when I do it. So that starting in a suit can easy and smoothly end the show in a dress. But now I am at the mercy of a lottery!
Like that great old Springbok Radio show Pick a Box, the audience will choose a number and I will have to expose what is in that box. Not just that, but also ad-lib a connection to the next choice of box, which means that every performance will be different. As so many of the characters in the chorus line are our vibrant and inspiring politicians, maybe most members of the audience will call the show Kies 'n Doos!
Evita Bezuidenhout, now in her 80th year, is the Sophia Loren of the gang. I know how grumpy people get when they don't see her in the show. That's a chance they and I have to take. I'll encourage them to pretend they're in Parliament, looking at 20 MPs sitting in a row. Then try and choose the one with a brain! So good luck with finding Mrs B!
Other new gems waiting to be exposed in the boxes will be the recently discovered real Rubicon Speech that PW Botha was meant to have made on August 15, 1985 and didn't. There is also the elderly gentleman in Tamboerskloof who has lost his job because he can't manage the world of Twitter and poke, only to discover the best days of his life.
A tired member of a Cape Minstrel troupe will celebrate his love/hate relationship with a City that still denies him her motherly love. Angela Merkel pops in after a bad hair day. Desmond Tutu brings tranquillity and his divine quirkiness to a nation always in a state, while Jacob Zuma, after his State of the Nation recital, repeats that whatever they said he said, he never said. Nelson Mandela celebrates transparency in his ANC Government, while Mother Theresa tries to sort out who will be allowed to view the exhibition of cartoons that a great Prophet will open at Heaven's Gate. All that, of course, can only happen after the Khoisan healer banishes the ghosts of Jan van Riebeeck and other colonial pickpockets from the Theatre on the Bay auditorium.
Just a taste of what I have in store for my audience. But the greatest celebration is exactly that: a warm tribute to the nightly group of people who have taken time and courage to leave their homes to the protection of burglar alarms and Rott- weilers, piloted their cars through the crazy city traffic, to park their cars under the guidance of parking guards, some of whom have medical degrees from Ghana and Somalia, to attend an entertainment where they will laugh and many things that they don't want to even think about. And maybe cry a little too.
The show is a tribute to the audience, without whom there would be no show. An Audience with Pieter Dirk? Eish! Come and see for yourself!
l At Theatre on the Bay, Monday to Saturday at 8pm until March 14, 021 438 3300, 0861 915 8000.