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REVIEWS OF FOREIGN AIDS IN SOUTH AFRICA  —  JULY 2002

Foreign Aids

– Caroline Smart, artsmart, 14 July 2002

Forming a fitting last night to the 2002 National Arts Festival for me was the good choice of Pieter-Dirk Uys’s Foreign Aids where the inimitable satirist appears mainly as himself. Evita Bezuidenhout is nowhere to be seen. The only woman he portrays — and in a very beautiful draped wrap which I envied heartily — was Evita’s equally outrageous sister, Bambi Kellermann.

The performance drew heavily from his show For Fact’s Sake which played the 2000 National Arts Festival and I have included here extracts from my review at the time which are still relevant.

"The department of health should employ Pieter-Dirk Uys on a permanent basis to perform his show at every single school in the country, not to mention theatre, church hall or community centre. With his new show For Fact’s Sake (pronounce it slowly!), he is liable to achieve more in the fight against AIDS among the young of South Africa than 10 Sarafina 2s and all the workshops, talk and literature put together."

What is it about this man of brilliant logic that allows him to say the most outrageous things and people love him for it? Is he courageous, bloody-minded or driven by a desire to say what needs to be said, whether or not he gets paid for it? I believe it is the latter. He has a big heart and an acutely analytical brain and if he feels strongly enough about a subject, he is driven to do everything in his power — which is considerable — to do what he can.”

He’s honed his well-known caricature of PW Botha to such an extent that a wagging finger is enough to produce howls of delighted recognition from the audience. "Apartheid is dead but the smell tends to linger," he says. And while "politics isn’t lethal, it’s just irritating."

What is lethal, however, is AIDS. Donning surgical hat, gloves, mask and pipe he takes off President Thabo Mbeki’s stance on HIV/AIDS. Other characters are a policeman on desk duty who is more interested in watching Hansiegate than listening to the continual phone calls for help from a woman who is being gang-raped. As in For Fact’s Sake he presents his frank and hilarious account of his first experience at masturbation ("my first one-man show!").

Back to the 2000 review: "He exhorts every member of the audience to accept the fact that is never too early to instruct children about sex: "I’ve just met a father who was nine years old. The mother was ten - she was obviously into toy boys!", he quips, but the message comes across loud and clear. Arm children with the necessary knowledge to save their lives as soon as possible.

The subject of condoms is dealt with efficiently and amusingly and he finishes the show with Mandela who maintains that "the struggle is not yet over" and that he finds it sad that he must instruct his grandchildren to "put their love in a plastic bag".

Pieter-Dirk has performed to 200 schools and reached 400,000 children throughout South Africa. Long may he continue to exercise his brilliant brain to lambaste those responsible for the welfare of South Africa to remove themselves from their political high horse and get in touch with real problems, like the hypocrisy and ignorance surrounding the HIV/AIDS crisis. His programme notes state that he has been "doing what he is doing since the early 1970’s and hopes to keep doing what he plans to do for some time to come. As long as he has the genius of politicians as inspiration, he could be around for ever!" Let’s hope so.

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Uys tackles Aids

– Barbara Ludman, Joburg News,  19 August 2002

Pieter-Dirk Uys is on stage in black jeans and T-shirt, making sardonic comments as he flips through a copy of the Sunday Times. Five minutes ago he was out in the lobby, chatting with the same people who are now watching him on stage. "It's the sign of a consummate professional - someone who can mingle with the audience and then go straight up on stage", says an actor turned journalist. "I was always backstage, going 'pah pah pah'… 'pi pi pi'"…

Uys is a consummate professional. He's grown sharper with age; this is a very angry Uys. We're no longer concerned just about quality of life, he says; the issue now is quality of death.

Foreign Aids is a full-length show about Aids, and most of the time it's very funny. How do you laugh at Aids? Uys can make a joke out of anything — but, he says, we're not laughing at Aids. We're laughing at fear.

So his character, Bambi Kellermann, widow of a high-ranking Nazi whose ashes she carries around in a carved box, goes to London once a month to get her supply of triple therapy on the National Health.

For Bambi has HIV — and then Uys whips off the blond wig and shrugs on a surgical gown, and we've got Dr Thaboo MacBeki, the medical expert, spouting Shelley and Shakespeare ("to be or not to be sure whether HIV causes Aids") and trying to smoke his pipe through a surgical mask.

Uys segues almost seamlessly from one character to another. The stage is piled high with cardboard boxes, and one of them contains his props — wigs, make-up case, a shawl, high heels, a Madiba shirt.

The show, despite the title, is not exclusively about Aids. In a peaked cap, hunched over a telephone on a cardboard box, Uys is a desk sergeant at an understaffed police station taking a panic call from a woman whose house is being broken into. The suspects are three men who appeared at her gate and asked for food — "You opened your security gate? Lady, let them starve in the street, that's what it's for."

Evita Bezuidenhout — "the most famous white woman in South Africa" — opens the second half of the show, dressed in a glorious Errol Arendz gown. She's in charge of catering at the World Summit, making sure delegates get putu and wors instead of the caviar served at the last gathering of heads of state concerned about world hunger.

Ah, but one of her sons is HIV-positive. We're back to Aids.

Uys has spent the past two years travelling to schools across the country, performing and informing hundreds of thousands of pupils about the dangers of unprotected sex. If you've been wondering what he's said to ten-year-olds on the Cape flats and 16-year-olds at posh private girls' schools, here's your chance to find out.

For more than four decades, Uys has been sending up politicians, and nobody does them better — he no longer even needs the hat to give us former president PW Botha.

The same genius works when he describes the children — the little boy at Nazareth House in Jo'burg who discovered to his intense delight that Evita Bezuidenhout "is not a lady"; the six-year-old girl at Grabouw who sat in the front row at one of his school trips and said she knew all about sex.

It's funny stuff, and bittersweet. Vintage Uys — and not for the squeamish.

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