Matthew Krouse
Evita Bezuidenhout and Nowell Fine, Pieter-Dirk Uys’s ostentatious, outspoken alter-egos, have been alive as long as South Africans of voting age. If Adapt or Dye – his solo piece that gave birth to them – was first performed in 1982, then today’s youth have had their political consciousness spiked by these two from the moment they understood the concept of “wrong”.
If they were perceptive kids with modern parents they would have been informed that it was wrong when the censors of the old regime tampered with Uys’s political criticisms. If their parents were God- fearing whites, they may have regarded it sinful that Uys ripped into religiously revered figures – most heinously disguised as women!
Whatever their backgrounds, when the youth considered the June 2 election they had little choice but to take Uys’s view of it into account. Indeed, in previous months all South Africans must have encountered him in the flesh or on television. At no stage of his career has he fulfilled his role as the country’s major satirist with more visibility.
Firstly, in the run-up to the election he travelled to remote places in full drag preaching that, however serious, this was also a moment for light reflection on party promises. Evita’s Ballot Bus, as the tour was named, was serialised as part of SABC’s election programming, and her walkabouts in wayward pastures brought people closer together – bridging kilometres and decades.
Plainly, the Ballot Bus tour did for Uys what the Union Building concert did for the three tenors. It exposed his talent to a new audience – more marginal and less theatre literate than ones before. So it was perhaps a primal act of survival that pushed him to the outer limits in previous months.
He saw it coming. In 1996, bemoaning the lack of work for actors, in a National Arts Festival publication he said: “Let’s move into the platteland, where people wait hungrily for what city-dwellers ignore. A national festival circuit might solve a cluster of problems. If there are three, four festivals per month throughout South Africa, entertainment can grow and be shared.”
Today, three years later, the country may be more united, but theatre audiences have never been so far apart. Of course, there’s still no real festival circuit, so Uys has engineered one for himself.
The Ballot Bus tour complete, most performers would have retired to a peaceful corner, but not Uys. A week before the election he took to the main stage of the Market Theatre, not with just one solo show, but with two: Dekaffirnated and Going Down Gorgeous.
In response, suburbanites paid tribute to an artist considered more a close friend, putting aside fears of inner city crime – as Uys always jokes – and the autumn chill to see him. At the Market Theatre Precinct the bars were buzzing. Even the restaurant owners who usually decry the lack of business hired additional staff on really busy nights.
Uys was unanimously praised, apart from a singular black critic who called him a racist (a response he’ll probably confront more often in the future).
In a way, the Market Theatre season has been a sort of homecoming for Uys – for Evita Bezuidenhout at any rate. It was here at the Market Theatre caf, no longer in existence, that Evita was born in 1982, a short while after Uys decided not to run as a joke candidate in a by-election for Westdene.
In the process of trying to find 300 signatures needed to register his candidacy, he received an anonymous death threat from somebody inquiring whether he wanted to become “the John Lennon of Westdene?”.
It was a phone call from his old buddy Sophia Loren that decided him, when she said: “Don’t mix yourself with politics. It’s a dirty game. Go back to the theatre where you are strong.” So he sat down and wrote Adapt or Dye.
In those days, Uys was so marginal that Evita took to the podium in a late night slot – meaning he only began his performance way after 10pm. Likewise in the late Seventies, he took most of his plays to Grahamstown, staging them on the festival fringe.
These days, of course, he is so prolific and well known that he owns his own little town. While Darling on the Cape’s West Coast is not exclusively his, it might as well be.
This year, at the Standard Bank National Arts Festival, Darling comes to Grahamstown in the form of five different productions – that’s if Uys hasn’t burnt himself out.
Four of them are solo satires, based on what could be described as the world of Evita Bezuidenhout. Drag interpretations of everyday South African life.
Tannie Evita Praat Kaktus, Ouma Osewania Praat Vuil and Going Down Gorgeous are all the proof needed to verify that Uys is one of the world’s great drags, along with Ru Paul, Dame Edna Everage and the late Divine. Dekaffirnated is Uys’s major take on the election, while Nol & Marlene is an offshoot of his previous obsession with the lives of Hollywood sirens.
All of these productions emanate from Evita se Perron, the refurbished station from where Uys runs his life. In fact, in what is probably to be his final act before he collapses, Uys is effectively staging a festival within the festival – testimony to the fact that no performer in the country has his energy. Not after the year he’s had.