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REVIEWS OF FOREIGN AIDS IN AUSTRALIA  —  OCTOBER / NOVEMBER 2002 

Knowledge is power in game of life and death

– Stephen Dunne, The Sydney Morning Herald, 1 November 2002

Towards the end of this brilliant one-man show, Pieter-Dirk Uys sums up: "I have seen the future in South Africa, and it will work, if we keep the kids alive."

Keeping the kids alive is central to Uys's life. In between stage and TV performances in his native country, he tours schools, doing several shows a day presenting vital and potentially life-saving information about safer sex and condoms.

It's a hard, volunteer grind. "If I was employed to do this, I'd resign," he quips, but there's passion and commitment here, a legible sense of fervour and righteousness. He's visibly excited about the "2000 kids, sitting cross-legged on the concrete floor, waiting for me to be funny ... about death". And he is funny about death and many other things. This show is a wonderful object lesson in the fine line between the comic and the tragic, a reminder that the best comedy should make an audience uncomfortable, angry and passionate.

Uys notes that once South Africa was infected by a virus called apartheid ("a pigment of the imagination", according to his instant and uncanny P.W. Botha). Now South Africa is infected by a virus called HIV.

The statistics for HIV infection rates in the African continent are genuinely horrifying, and almost incomprehensible for a rich, Western country like ours — especially given our free universal health care and proud history of effective responses to the epidemic.

Uys is resistant to the habit of AIDS professionals of turning everything into statistics. With devastatingly satiric characters and vast reserves of charm, he concentrates on the human faces of the epidemic.

This is not a polite show, but then it's not a polite virus. A sequence on urban myths shifts into horrifying territory: the African legend that sex with a virgin is a cure for "the thinning disease". Safe sex education can get very bleak indeed in a culture where rape is commonplace.

Uys saves his most acidic venom for the Government of Thabo Mbeki ("My mind is made up. Don't confuse me with facts") and its embrace of ignorance and fantasy about basic epidemiology. "Once upon a time, we had a government that killed people. Now we have a government that just lets them die."

Greedy Western drug companies, white liberals, and even Nelson Mandela's taste in shirts come in for a serve. The characters - South Africa's "most famous white woman", Mrs Evita Bezuidenhout, her alcoholic Nazi-marrying sister, Bambi, the Jewish African princess, Nowell Fine, a procedure-obsessed copper, Mandela and dying theatre designer Andre - are excellent creations, but it's the narration in between, as he changes wigs and slips, that packs the most punches.

Uys's other main message is simple commonsense: inform your kids, tell them the truth. Knowledge is power in this game, and as he says "sex will happen", whether their guardians like it or not. The choice is stark: be informed and act on that information, or be dead. Yet throughout this unnerving, inspiring comedy, his passion for all his fellow citizens and their new democracy, his "terminal optimism", shines through.

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Transforming Performing: Must See

– Diana Simmonds, Sunday Telegraph, 3 November 2002

You can go to the theatre for a good time, to escape, to be enthralled by brilliant performance skills, to be dazzled by wit and charm, to laugh, cry and be amazed.

Or you can go and see Pieter-Dirk Uys in his one-man show Foreign Aids and do all that, and also have an experience that could change your life, change the lives of kids on another continent and make you glad and grateful to be alive — all in one evening.

Uys is South Africa's most extraordinary cultural export because he's a white African who tells the truth: how appalling was Botha and his viciousness and also how appalling is Mbeki and his indifference.

Botha's government killed people, explains Uys. Mbeki simply lets them die.

The reason, of course, is AIDS and if you don't think it's possible to laugh yourself silly while learning a little of the horror that's facing young Africa, it's because you haven't met Uys's alter egos, Mrs Evita Bezuidenhout, her sister Mme Bambi Kellermann, and the small group of assorted misfits who accompany them.

Uys has been called 'South Africa's Edna Everage', but that's a bit like calling 'Dopey' Hollingworth (scandal-ridden Governor-General of Australia) our Desmond Tutu.

Uys is a performer whose instinct for the killer observation, the perfectly-timed punchline and the stiletto-sharp riposte is matched by his compassion, humour and courage.

Foreign Aids is political satire in its highest and most dangerous form and theatre at its most entertaining.

It is important, for when life is so scary and inexplicable you have to be able to laugh in order to understand those deepest darkest fears.

The Sydney Opera House and the Gay Games should be proud of bringing Evita and Bambi to Australia; and if you can get a bunch of kids together — yours, next door's, anybody's — and take them to see Oom Pieter's little show, you'll feel better about it for the rest of your life.

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Girls' Night Out

– Colin Rose, The Sun-Herald, 3 November 2002

While the Sydney Gay games opened officially yesterday, the games' cultural festival is already in full swing. Among the headline acts are two terrific solo performances, South African satirist Pieter-Dirk Uys and American singer-anecdotist Bea Arthur.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s Uys heaped blistering sarcasm on South Africa's apartheid regime. Apartheid is gone, but Uys (pronounced Ace) has a new mission: ridiculing his Government's head-in-the-sand approach to fighting HIV/AIDS. If that sounds like iffy material to joke about, well, yes, this is a show about fear, ignorance, plain stupidity and, ultimately, death.

It's very funny — a point I'd underline because Foreign Aids is also distressing. Not the least of Uys's achievements here is the phenomenal balance of laughter with out-and-out shock.

'Once upon a time,' Uys says, 'we had a government in South Africa that killed people - now it just lets them die.' Government inaction and blundering,' he says, 'has allowed AIDS to succeed where apartheid failed.'

Uys is at his most disturbing when he speaks to the audience as himself, describing his experiences of touring South African schools with performances aimed at raising awareness about HIV/AIDS prevention, or of visiting hospices for young people suffering from the 'thinning sickness'.

These stories are terribly moving and in their sense of injustice, maddening. Uys channels his own anger through a bunch of wickedly funny characters he conjures up, dressing and applying his make-up on stage.

Evita Bezuidenhout, the 'most famous white woman in South Africa' is bejewelled, gowned and wigged a la Dame Edna Everage. Evita's sister Bambi Kellermann, is an alcoholic and HIV-positive former stripper whose dead husband was a Nazi (she draws a perhaps unwise comparison between the Holocaust and the AIDS epidemic).

South African President Thabo Mbeki makes an appearance: 'My mind is made up — don't confuse me with facts.'

There's also a pen-pushing white cop whose bureaucratic response to an emergency is way beyond anything Kafka ever dreamed of.

And then there's Andre, a gay man with AIDS. He's not played for laughs.

Powerful stuff.

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