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An  Audience with

Pieter-Dirk Eish!

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REVIEWS OF AN AUDIENCE WITH PIETER-DIRK EISH!  in JOHANNESBURG — MAY 2013

Breaking the Eish: Pieter-Dirk opens up

There is a sense of the confessional permeating the new show by Pieter-Dirk Uys. For all that he dresses up as different characters, it feels like his own personality is the character most laid bare. As if, after years of presenting his views through the mouths of others, it’s time to strip off the make-up and tell us more about himself

– Lesley Stones, Daily Maverick, 9 May 2013

That makes An Audience with Pieter-Dirk EISH! fascinatingly intimate, an evening where the man who has made generations laugh also reveals the tears, bitterness, anger or regret accumulated from living in such a twisted world — a white objector in a Nazi-like regime, and a gay one at that.

Uys is brilliantly back on top form in this 90-minute show, already making himself vulnerable by its structure. There are 16 boxes on stage, each with a costume or prop inside that turn him into one of his creations. He engages easily with the audience, getting people to pick a number then spinning an introductory tale as he dons the outfit.

It’s beautifully crafted, with his repartee easily switching into the prepared material as his character comes to life. The parts in between, where he chats about his life and shares the views he has as Uys, the man behind the face paint, are just as rewarding as the personas he becomes.

He’s a man known for speaking in the voice of others, particularly as Evita Bezuidenhout, his eyelash-fluttering creation who mingles with presidents and politicians and flails them with her opinions. We didn’t get Evita on the opening night, and I was pleased. Instead we got more poignant, less strident scenes from a long life that clearly hasn’t all been the thrill of the curtain call.

Most moving was a scene that began when he drew a single newspaper from a box, and quietly told us of a party where gays from across the colour range were mingling in the thick of Apartheid. He tells it beautifully, tiptoeing around to show how he crept through a garden, letting us see him not as an elderly actor but as a young man defying Apartheid. Until the morning, when he slopes off to the safely of the white suburb. It’s a mesmerising account, the actor laid bare in a moving story of how this messed up country messed up so many lives.

Then he bounces back with a chirp and joke to lighten the sombre mood. It’s masterfully done.

Another box gives us Swanepoel, a bitter racist proudly recalling the days he tortured prisoners in John Voster police station. He’s faring well in the new South Africa, teaching the current government the tricks of the past. “Remember when we tied prisoners to the back of a police car and dragged them to their deaths? Oh yeah, they’re already learned that one…”

Swanepoel is a nasty character, and you have to wonder in this spirit of disclosure how much of the racist lurks within. Uys was brought up to be racist, he says, no apologies. But he’s a reformed racist, and gets a laugh from all the guilty whites when he says he won’t even revert to being racist in the traffic.

He tells us to leave our phones on and Google anything we don’t understand as he replays history. But this isn’t a history lesson, like some previous shows where he felt too rooted in the past and in danger of becoming irrelevant in a tumultuous present that still needs his satire and wit to prod us in the right direction.

He’s woven in plenty of topicality, including the Guptas. Please don’t tell the North Koreans about Waterkloof, he quips. Then he does a lovely impression of Mandela under the onslaught of Zuma and the visiting ANC bigwigs last month.

Uys spins delightful stories of how he first got into the theatre and how a teacher told him he could be anything he wanted. He appeals to teachers to carry on creating that magic for the youngsters of today. He chats to some born frees who will vote for the first time next year, and wonders what sort of future they will make for us.

There are plenty of laughs, but often it’s not comedy as much as very powerful storytelling, and it's all the richer for that. DM

An Audience with Pieter-Dirk EISH! runs at Sandton’s Theatre on the Square until May 25.

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**** You can’t put Pieter-Dirk Uys in a box

– Diane de Beer, Tonight, 14 May 2013

Like a precious red wine, Pieter-Dirk Uys is maturing magnificently. He is as sharp, searing and to the point as he always was but add to that a sensibility that hits the sweet spot in ways that jog your memory to make you both laugh and cry.

To navigate your way through our political landscape as a white male performer is only for the brave. He cunningly tells stories that reflect on and revile the past, while constantly pointing to the future lest we forget how easily one can go down that slippery slope. That’s part of his brilliance as he disses the painful past, to prevent that we ever forget.

This is his show yet he invites the audience to decide on the chronology by playing pick a box (“if as in most instances we’re referring to politicians, kies ’n doos!”). The show is 90 minutes and no one show is ever the same.

He doesn’t let go of all the control though. There are a few extras he slips in unexpectedly, of which the most poignant and piercing is his Mandela reflection as he wonders what the man in the picture was thinking while put on show during Zuma’s recent visit. It’s a masterful dismantling of exploitation as we witness the frail man who first led our democracy and his possible private thoughts.

Uys clearly has his finger on the pulse of the nation as he plays with fear and the way people look at the world. He doesn’t dwell there, though, as he takes us back and reminds us of what was and where we never want to return to.

Guptastan is tackled on many occasions and he has many suggestions of how The Family can spend their money to benefit the people best.

He also has fun with Noelle Fine, his liberal kugel. Or he wanders down memory lane with a Polish Jewish pensioner who still lives in Hillbrow where she teaches the Nigerian drug lord’s children computer literacy.

Some old favourites re-emerge but the familiar stories are updated with new punchlines as he looks to the future while regurgitating old frenemies such as the security policeman, Mandela’s prison warder and a quick glimpse of PW who kept him going through the 1980s.

On the night, the mood because of the boxes picked was almost melancholy. Even when funny (and he always is), it was often impossible to escape the horror.

But that’s the Uys genius. He will get you giggling while hitting you hard and making you think.

Please remember to safeguard the future. That’s what people died for. And he gets this across while his audience dies laughing. Eish!

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Eish in the hand for Pieter-Dirk

Satirist Pieter-Dirk Uys revisits some old friends in his new show, “An Audience with Pieter-Dirk Eish!”

– Peter Feldman, Artslink, 8 May 2013

It’s as clever and entertaining as ever — even though I’ve seen some of the sketches before.

As he tells his audience: “It’s amazing how you can take an old sketch, give it a new punch-line and it’s so topical.”

And that’s exactly what Uys’ show is all about. His inspiration is drawn deeply from the well of nostalgia in which the popular satirist seems to wallow.

He meticulously sets about recreating the apartheid era, talks about what it was like to grow up being gay and facing hostility, the politicians who inspired him and the various characters he has created during his theatrical journey.

The show relies heavily on audience participation and each performance is guaranteed to take a different tack. A member of the audience selects a numbered box on stage. Each box has its own story to tell.

From the box Uys unfurls various paraphernalia and suddenly he magically materialises into a new entity, weaving from Swanepoel, a tough and much hated police interrogator who loved his job to bits, to his popular Sandton kugel, Nowell Fine. A touching character he creates is the elderly Holocaust survivor from Poland who lives in Hillbrow in a flat in which she is forced to walk up two floors because two Somali families are living in the lifts.

The show is intimate and the rapport between the performer and his audience is cleverly maintained with informative chit-chat and a flow of shrewd insights into the world we now occupy.

Nothing seems to have changed over the decades except the colour and shape of the politics. Seizing a headline from today’s news, Uys recreates in marvellous detail Nelson Mandela’s encounter at his home with Jacob Zuma and his entourage. His facial features tell their own story.

I’ve followed with interest Pieter-Dirk Uys’ career over several decades and he may have lost his head of hair but he hasn’t lost his touch or been out of touch.

Laughter, they say, is the best medicine and there is loads of the good stuff in this show.

“An Audience with Pieter-Dirk Eish!” is on at The Theatre on the Square, Nelson Mandela Square.

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Playing the numbers

– Bruce Dennill, The Citizen, 9 May 2013

FOR a while there — a consequence of his insane speaking schedule, mainly — it seemed that Pieter-Dirk Uys had become more of a brand than an individual, with his monologues becoming ever more familiar as you listened to what seemed to be the same handful of stories.

An Audience With Pieter-Dirk Eish! proves the satirist, commentator and comedian still has it in spades, fortunately, due to two clever mechanisms that determine the flow of each individual show.

Firstly, the “audience with” part of the title is accurate: participation is required, valued and rewarded. Secondly, because the piece’s different scenes are determined by the contents of 16 boxes arrayed behind Uys on the stage, no two shows will ever be the same, as the 90-minute running time won’t allow him to work his way through all the available sketches.

Also, given Uys’s experience and ability to process and include breaking news in his shows, even choosing the same boxes will result in different outcomes — if the box contains a cue to discuss fear, for example, Uys can include that day’s headlines in his extrapolation.

Watching Uys adapt his script on the fly is great theatre in its own right, and his ability to morph into a distinct character with the addition of just one or two minor props remains extraordinary. A turn as a boorish ex-security policeman is particularly chilling.

Uys admitted at his opening night performance that the choices of boxes for that evening had meant he’d had to work quite hard to get laughs in between sketches, but that is the nature of this show, and it’s all the stronger for it.

It’s not comedy. It’s closer to the hard-hitting, cynical spoken-word material performed by the likes of Henry Rollins, but with dresses and make-up (if required). You will laugh from time to time — humour is a trademark of any great raconteur — but you’ll also be moved and challenged.

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An Audience With Pieter-Dirk Eish at Sandton Theatre on the Square

– Moira de Swardt, artscomments, 8 May 2013

Pieter-Dirk Uys begins his show by sharing that he wouldn’t be on stage if he hadn’t started out as a member of an audience way back in 1961. He then allows the audience to take him back, randomly, through seven of sixteen prepared sketches.

It works on a “Pick A Box” principle with a costume for every sketch in one of the numbered boxes. The exact mix and order is randomly ordered by the audience.

The sketches are often ones that Pieter-Dirk Uys has presented before, but he explains that one can take an old sketch, give it a new punch line and it will be as topical as Gupta. And that’s exactly what he does as he presents what Nelson Mandela was thinking while he was on TV recently with “… who ARE these people? … I wish they would go away and leave me in peace.”

Pieter-Dirk Eish finds some born-frees in the audience and gives them a lesson in the history of bigotry in this country, from apartheid, homophobia, racism (including situational traffic racism) and the prognosis for the future.

Some of the characters are new to me. I haven’t seen our Hillbrow Bobba before — a survivor from Poland sent to Treblinka who eventually lands up in the cosmopolitan Hillbrow. Mandela’s jailer is also a new character to me, as is Swanepoel, a police interrogator from the Apartheid Era shortly before 1994. These are all somewhat tragic characters for one reason or another.

The cleverness of the show is how Pieter-Dirk Uys, sorry, Pieter-Dirk Eish links these sketches so seamlessly.

There is old material here, but as he says, every show is new because it is a new audience, a new set of energies. Even though Piet Koornhof, Pik Botha, Bambi, Ouma Ossewania, Tannie Evita and his adopted puppet did not make an appearance, the audience was held entranced.

“An Audience with Pieter-Dirk Eish!” is on at The Theatre on the Square, Nelson Mandela Square.

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