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Dekaffirnated

REVIEWS OF DEKAFFIRNATED IN LONDON — JULY 1999

Comedy: Satire is alive and well and living in South Africa

– James Rampton, The Independent, 23 July 1999

POLITICAL STAND-UP comedy in this country is like voting Tory at a general election: a decidedly passe kind of thing to do. In South Africa, by contrast, people have never had the luxury of taking politics for granted. Even five years after the end of apartheid, politics still infuses every nook and cranny of South African life.

So it is hardly surprising that the leading comedian from that country, Pieter-Dirk Uys, should be a biting political satirist. He is now so used to the political arena that he recently performed in the South African Parliament as his most famous creation, Mrs Evita Bezuidenhout, South Africa's answer to Dame Edna Everage. As he himself remarked: "I mean, please, can you see Lily Savage in the House of Commons?"

As Evita, he also fronted a 10,000 kilometre, 60-city voter-education campaign before the general election last month.

Uys has been a regular performer in London over the last decade, but his latest show, "Dekaffirnated", which opened at the Tricycle Theatre on Wednesday, is perhaps his most moving work yet. It underlines how hopes for the brave new world of the Rainbow Nation have in many cases been cruelly dashed. "We're quite a successful democracy," he reckons, "because we're all equally pissed off."

The most powerful sections of the show recount the voter apathy Uys encountered on his nationwide tour in the `ballot bus'.

Urging a black woman in a remote village to vote, he was unceremoniously rebuffed: "Why must I vote those fat cats back into a job when they haven't given me a job?" In another off-the-beaten-track community centre, a young black man in the audience stood up and told Uys: "We fought for freedom. All we got was democracy."

In the character sketches of various South Africans that comprise the show, Uys demonstrates the frequent absurdity of politics. Language, for instance, has been distorted beyond recognition in the politically-correct, post-apartheid South Africa. When a bus is stolen in a township these days, "we don't call it hijacking. We call it affirmative commuting."

Like all the best political comedians, Uys deftly intermingles light and shade, finding humour in subjects where by rights there shouldn't be any.

Who would have thought that a comedy show could include a routine about a white policeman telling Desmond Tutu's Truth and Reconciliation Commission the way he mistreated black female prisoners?

When apartheid came to an end, many predicted that Uys's satirical darts would be blunted. Sadly, the new political set-up has presented him with nearly as many sitting targets as the old.

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Colour coded

– Lyn Gardner, The Guardian, 24 July 1999

"I always used to say that the old South African government wrote all my best material, but the new government is catching up fast," says Pieter-Dirk Uys, the satirist who was the scourge of the old apartheid regime and whose videos were much enjoyed by Nelson Mandela while in prison. Times may have changed in South Africa, but Dirk Uys is sharper, wickeder and funnier than ever before and he has absolutely no compunction about savaging the hand that feeds him. He's the rottweiler conscience of the South African nation.

On a recent 60-town election tour it was white liberals who deemed some of his act offensive. Black audiences loved it, often travelling hundreds of miles, by whatever means they could, to get there. "We don't call it hijacking, we call it affirmative commuting." That's pretty mild for a comic whose alter ego, the fabulous Evita Bezuidenhout, is liable to bemoan the fact that the only way she can see her black grandchildren in the dark is when they smile.

As the title of this show suggests, Dirk Uys is concerned here with the nature of language, the difference between what we say and what we really think, how easy it is to hide our true feelings and attitudes behind politically correct words. It is only laughter that betrays us, rising involuntarily in the throat. Dirk Uys knows well enough that one person's joke is another's prejudice — there's even a gollywog hanging upside down on the piano.

Nobody is safe from his caustic humour: not the white liberals who left the country as soon as it became a democracy, not the Afrikaner nationalists in their rural strongholds ("Like doing Fiddler on the Roof in Nuremburg," is how he describes one of his election-tour performances), not the ANC, the Truth Commission, not PW Botha or Nelson Mandela. As Dirk Uys says: "We must be careful to offend everyone equally." Which he does.

I imagine it is rather what it would be like to watch a prime-time performer such as Rory Bremner doing an entire show about the Stephen Lawrence affair. But I don't think any British comic has the guts, anger, pain or wit to match Dirk Uys. This is a man who knows that more than just language is needed to bridge the reality gap between spending years of your life fighting for freedom and discovering that all you've got is democracy

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PIETER-DIRK UYS in DEKAFFIRNATED

– Ian Shuttleworth, Financial Times, July 1999

The most famous white woman in South Africa, Mrs Evita Bezuidenhout, is in fact satirist Pieter-Dirk Uys in a frock. Mrs Bezuidenhout is so well-known that Uys has just taken her, off his own bat, on a 60-date "voter education through entertainment" tour in "Evita's Ballot Bus" prior to last month's elections.

Uys has been visiting the Tricycle annually since 1995, and has also made several Edinburgh appearances. This, however, is the first time I have actually seen him perform. I must admit to a certain sensation of coming in after the interval, as it were: Uys contextualises his material adroitly enough for non-South Africans, but the element of context most sorely lacking for me was an awareness of the extent to which he — or at least Mrs Bezuidenhout — is an institution in his home country. This, after all, is a man who has impersonated former ministers such as Pik Botha to their faces, and not in order to flatter them (he still "does" P.W. Botha, and bemoans the fact that he no longer needs make-up to do so), and whose programme for this show includes a letter of support from then-President Mandela which refers to Mrs Bezuidenhout's recent speech before the South African parliament — as Uys remarks, "Can you see Lily Savage in the Houses of Parliament here?"

Little by little, Uys's stage manner overcomes almost all such reservations: when not in one character or another, he does not deliver material so much as chat easily to an audience, recounting details of the ballot bus tour and various other aspects of the new "Rainbow Nation" (including the linguistic PC-ism which gives the show its cheeky title). He gives every appearance of complete relaxation in these passages, even though the script may call for him the next moment to become a Cape Town bag person, a white Jo'burger now consigned to endless queueing for various bits of official identification, or even a quick burst of Bill Clinton. A couple of these sketches — one of an ex-interrogator appearing before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and as an elderly Holocaust refugee who now finds herself "Old Europe trapped in New Africa" — hit a masterly blend of humour and poignancy; in most of the material, though, the comedy has the upper hand, such that the persistent undertow of honest mickey-taking is delicately packaged. On the press night, the De Beers company had booked much of the balcony, so both in propria persona and as Mrs Bezuidenhout, Uys made passing comments about the diamond trade in general and de Beers in particular; his victims lapped it up. It is appropriate that the name of the Western Cape village in which Uys lives, and whose former railway station he has converted into a club, is called Darling.

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