THEATRE: Peter Frost
THE Truth Fairy’s in town. A sharper-than-ever Pieter-Dirk Uys, not content with the abolition of the apartheid system, is now targeting the forgetful South African public with its recent past, using the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as gunpowder.
The result is big, entertaining bangs. Truth Omissions (at the Baxter in Cape Town) presents Uys and his closet full of histrionic historicals to the interim sub-committee of the preliminary hearing of the truth commission, to atone for past misadventures. But Evita, PW, Pik, Koornhof, the Constantia Liberal et al balk at appearing before any Nuremberg nonsense (Koornhof sends a note declining, signed Khoisan Piet), and the truth appears already to be well and truly out … for the count.
Truth Omissions is meatier than the recent You ANC Nothing Yet, juggling the solid scripted format of Uys’s early shows with the looser improvisational style of his more recent pieces. Happily, a rich script predominates. Some of the stories, however, if not the words, are familiar — maybe too much so: PW lip-smacking his way through ”I was right, the Rubicon was crossed thanks to me”; Nowell Fine’s capitalism-levels-all whine; and Koornhof resurrected to soundbite his way out of pass laws and the Immorality Act.
But there are new voices who come before the commission too: the Kaapse klonkie with a brand new, rent-paying job with the boys in blue, remembering the loss of grandma’s District Six dining-room table; and the knife- twister of the show, the unwilling troopie stuck in a Casper lamenting the suicide of a buddy.
What startles most about Uys’s clever display is what a lone voice he has become in the crusade against cultural amnesia. Watching his troglodytes of the past makes it all the more obvious why we need a truth and reconciliation autopsy.
Truth Omissions sits divided by the interval. The first act is scripted, honed, witty and skerp; the second open to the floor to provide questions for a fabulously attired Evita, greying gracefully and almost sober in black and gold. This placing Evita at the mercy of an audience is brave, not so much for the ribald sexual innuendo that seems to crop up all the time, but because of the possibility it might not. Certainly Capetonians tend to shrink when house lights brighten an auditorium, but upcountry folk might prove more participatory.
Whichever, Evita has more than enough oomph to keep entertaining. The past might be missing but Uys’s engine most certainly isn’t.
Uys’s Truth Omissions runs at the Baxter in Cape Town until March 23