Pieter-Dirk Uys at 80 — the man who dressed the nation’s anxiety in pearls

In a country where fear once wore a uniform and irony was considered treason, Pieter-Dirk Uys walked onto a stage in 1981 dressed as an Afrikaans woman and began to dismantle the scaffolding of apartheid with a raised eyebrow and a leopard-print handbag. That woman was Evita Bezuidenhout, and she didn’t just mock the regime, she seduced it into listening.

Now, as Uys turns 80 on Sunday, 28 September, the question isn’t whether he changed South African theatre. It’s whether satirical South African theatre would have survived without him.

Theatre as a pressure valve

The first time Evita appeared at the Baxter Theatre, the air was thick with surveillance. I was 16 and I was there. He was 36. It was 1981 and the show was called Adapt or Dye. Security police sat stiffly in the audience, their presence as conspicuous as their discomfort. 

Evita, in a chic couture dress and accoutrement, stared them down. Uys then seamlessly changed into various other familiar characters and began to parody the very men who could have arrested him. 

He impersonated PW Botha (the last prime minister of South Africa) with bovine lip-licking and spastic gestures, Piet Koornhof (South Africa’s minister of cooperation and development) with his trademark evasions, and Desmond Tutu (international spiritual and anti-apartheid leader) with a gentle irreverence that made even Tutu laugh aloud. I saw this with my own eyes. Tutu bent over, slapping his knees, cracking up. 

The audience didn’t know whether to giggle or brace for a raid. But laughter won. Slowly, nervously, then uncontrollably. It was the first time many had seen their leaders lampooned in public. A window opened in a locked and stuffy room.

Uys wasn’t arrested. “I looked like either their mothers, grandmothers or aunties,” he said later. That was his shield, familial camouflage in a state allergic to dissent. 

Outside the theatre it was a land divided: armoured vehicles patrolling townships, guns and hand grenades used against protesters, apartheid in full force, Black families torn apart. Nelson Mandela was still in prison, on Robben Island, from where he could see Cape Town’s twinkly lights at night. 

Evita: the fictional politician who outlived the real ones

Evita Bezuidenhout was never just a character. She was a Trojan horse in heels. As South Africa’s self-appointed ambassador to the fictional homeland of Bapetikosweti, she embodied the contradictions of white liberalism, Afrikaner nationalism and capitalist opportunism. She was the Gucci-Pucci brigade personified, exaggerated, cynical, and always ready to serve her principles with a side of lampooning.

After the show, she left with a huge bunch of proteas (the national flower of South Africa). Evita walked off the stage, up the stairs of the huge theatre, regally waving, with the crowd following her and still applauding. 

Cameras flashed, the press were there en masse. She slowly drove off in a white Cadillac convertible with leopard-skin seating and Wagner blaring from the sound system, driven by an escaped convict in black leather, a cap and dark sunglasses. Imagine? No, for real! 

Evita often portrayed her family on stage. She had a husband named Oom Hasie, children named De Kock and Izan (Nazi spelled backwards) and a secretary named Bokkie Bam. Her sister, Bambi Kellermann, was a recovering stripper with a fondness for cabaret and commentary. Together, they formed a fictional family more politically coherent than most real ones.

Later, after his release, Evita interviewed Nelson Mandela on national television. She was invited to Parliament. Her biography, A Part Hate A Part Love, outsold many political memoirs. And when critics called her a tired joke, Uys replied: “Just because she doesn’t exist doesn’t mean she’s not real.”

The international stage

Over the decades, his audacity wasn’t confined to South African stages. He performed on Queen Elizabeth 2, between New York and the Caribbean. In London, Uys has played at many venues, including the Soho Theatre, Donmar Warehouse and Purcell Room. In New York, he notably appeared at La Mama Theatre, where his one-man show, Foreign Aids, earned him an Obie Award in 2004. He later performed the show as part of the American Repertory Theatre’s South African Festival in 2005.

In 1984 the New York Times wrote: “His revues draw much from Mr Uys’s dressing in various female roles, offering a kind of closet ‘transvestitism’ to a society of hidebound sexual prejudices. Outsiders attending one of Mr Uys’s (pronounced Ace) revues to a South African audience, sometimes gain the impression that the relationship between player and audience has something of the nervous shocked giggle of clandestinity rather than open theater.”

They continue: “When Mr Uys says ‘k*ffer’ and the audience laughs; there is an underlying uncertainty. They seem to be asking: Should we really be laughing? And are we laughing at our own prejudices or simply escaping briefly from them in the dark secret world of the auditorium?”

But perhaps Uys’s most enduring international connection is with Italian screen legend Sophia Loren. His admiration for Loren started in childhood, as he fell in love with her image. As a teenager, Uys took the brave step of visiting Loren’s home and leaving her a letter when she was not there. This connection blossomed into a sustained pen friendship, and they eventually met and developed a special enduring bond over the years.

The British actor, director, writer and humanitarian Peter Ustinov was a fan and even wrote about Uys in one of his books. When the singer and actor Marlene Dietrich performed in Cape Town during the late Sixties, there was a young man who ran up to her with a bunch of roses after each performance. 

That man was Pieter-Dirk Uys. 

Satire in the age of algorithms

Uys has outlived apartheid, censorship and several presidents. But he’s not sure satire will survive social media. “Fake news is the end of real opinion,” he says. “Freedom of speech, yes, but does the algorithm enjoy that freedom too?”

His upcoming show is titled Not AI; just me. It’s a declaration of human presence in a digital fog. There has been criticism of him impersonating Tutu, but he doesn’t compete with cancel culture. “If people don’t like my impersonations, they can keep busy on TikTok.”

He’s not nostalgic. He’s vigilant. “Apartheid was never funny,” he says. “The perpetrators were. Comedy is the joke. Humour is laughing at fear.”

His philosophy has always been action-oriented: “If you do something, anything can happen. If you do nothing, nothing will happen.” Yet he carries one regret: “The only regret I have is that I didn’t tackle the things I was too scared to take on.”

The anatomy of fear

Uys knows fear intimately. In 1966, he was 21, gay and living in a country where love was criminalised. He recalls a party in Woodstock, Cape Town, where he met a young, so-called coloured man named Alan. They couldn’t be seen together in public. Even driving him home was a risk.

Alan lived in a gardener’s hut (he was the gardener) behind a house in the posh suburb of Kenilworth. To avoid detection, Uys had to hide in a hedge while Alan snuck him in. Inside, they folded each other’s clothes with the reverence of class and race stripped bare. “Once we had both discarded the uniforms of our class, we were the same,” Uys writes. “In the candlelight, we didn’t even have a colour.”

The next morning, Alan panicked. “They will find you here with me. I will lose my job. I will go to jail.” Uys left through a hole in the fence, dodging dogs and neighbours with guns. He never saw Alan again.

That story isn’t about romance. It’s about the architecture of fear. And it’s why Uys never treated apartheid as a punchline. He treated it as a pathology.

From banned plays to national institution

Uys’s early plays were banned for being “offensive” or “unrepresentative”. Selle ou Storie, Karnaval, Info Scandals, all censored. He once tried to stage a striptease in front of the Voortrekker Monument (a monument commemorating the Afrikaner Voortrekkers and the Great Trek in 1835). 

He performed Farce About Uys just blocks from John Vorster Square, the notorious police headquarters. On stage, he joked: “If pigs could fly, John Vorster Square would be an international airport.” The audience roared. The police did not.

Afrikaans newspapers eventually embraced him. Die Vaderland called him “a man who succeeds in making a joke of our country and politicians”. That was a seismic shift. Afrikaners were laughing at themselves in public. The Boere Olympus had cracked.

The satirical Stonehenge of Darling

Uys alternates between living in Cape Town and Darling (75km outside Cape Town), where the theatre he had started, Evita se Perron, stands as a museum, theatre, restaurant and satirical shrine. It houses apartheid-era artefacts, a garden called Boerassic Park, and stray resident cats.

(Boerassic Park is a satirical outdoor sculpture garden and features humorous and absurd statues and sculptures that poke fun at South Africa’s political history and cultural icons. Think of it as a garden where satire and art meet.) 

Evita se Perron (perron is the Afrikaans word for platform, the name a tongue-in-cheek play on Eva Perón) where he performs most weekends, still writing, still dressing up, still refusing to retire. “Some people go to the gym,” he says. “I go to the stage.”

During the pandemic he livestreamed shows from Penny Lane Studios (a world-class recording studio and rehearsal space in Wynberg). He released archival collections of his one-man shows, free to the public. Uys turned lockdown into a retrospective, not a retreat.

The educator

Through For Facts Sake, Uys has reached more than 1.5 million schoolchildren during the Aids pandemic with HIV education. He’s performed in prisons, reformatories and rural schools. He recalls meeting men in their forties who said: “Thanks for that wake-up call. I’m still alive.”

He made videos like Having Sex with Pieter-Dirk Uys and Just a Small Prick, tackling stigma with humour. He separated comedy from humour deliberately. “Comedy is the joke. Humour is laughing at fear. That fear can still kill you, but at least you’ve got your eyes on it.”

The man behind the wig

Uys has authored novels, memoirs, cookbooks and biographies. He’s received honorary doctorates from five universities. He’s won the Truth and Reconciliation Award, the Teddy Award in Berlin and the FW de Klerk Goodwill Award. He’s been honoured by both the state and the stage.

But he remains officially “unemployed”. “I write, direct, act, produce and do everything else, including the making of dresses and the wearing of them.”

He’s not interested in legacy. He’s interested in impact. “The only human right I have is the right to be human.”

The final act is still unwritten

At 80, Uys is still touring. He’s still writing Evita’s autobiography. He’s still performing in London, Durban, Johannesburg and Cape Town. He’s still challenging the idea that satire has an expiry date.

He doesn’t want to be remembered as a national treasure. He wants to be remembered as a national irritant. The kind that keeps democracy awake.

In a country where history often arrives in camouflage, Pieter-Dirk Uys showed up as Evita Bezuidenhout (and many other characters) and told the truth. Not with slogans. With jokes. Not with outrage. With irony. And not with permission. With audacity.

He was 36 when I saw him for the first time at the Baxter in 1981, and I’ll always remember that opening night: my personal political Rubicon at the age of 16. 

Happy birthday and vat so, skattie! DM

Herman Lategan is a drama graduate (inspired by Uys), journalist and writer based in Cape Town.