>From New York to Darling, Pieter-Dirk Uys has been riding high on people’s fears. Andr Wiesner reports
‘Who’s writing all this crap? Is it me?” asks Pieter-Dirk Uys, in exasperation at South Africa’s absurdities. An apartheid- era Cabinet minister, for instance, is reinvented as a titan of the struggle; or a former South African Police torturer runs into one of his victims and tells him: “Hell, man, forgive and forget.” The torturer scuttles off. He’s sporting African National Congress colours. He’s also a bodyguard to Nelson Mandela.
“I can’t make up things like that,” says Uys. “It’s one absurdity loaded on another, which is why I’m not a satirist. The world’s so mad it’s enough just to report the truth.”
After having taken Dekaffirnated on tour to Europe and New York, Uys is back in Cape Town for the show’s run at the Baxter Theatre. While he describes living in the only New National Party-controlled province as “God’s punishment to me for wearing women’s clothing”, Uys finds that the NNP’s regional control by coloureds is “wonderfully funny”.
“The slave’s taken over the plantation and forced the plantation owner into the background,” he says, “so I have to rewrite my own prejudices.”
Indeed, rewriting prejudices is central to Dekaffirnated, which explores the “enormous optimism and controlled disappointment” Uys found during his election-awareness campaign. “Dekaffirnated is the first minefield of a show since the ones under apartheid. It’s about words: k-words, n-words, about the power we give them to frighten and humiliate people.”
The show examines the violence of language. With Jan van Riebeek’s arrival, the people of the south are denigrated as “kaffirs”. The word is literally a curse: it blights the country and is lifted only centuries later, which accomplishes the process of “dekaffirnation” referred to in the title.
This process apparently involves the two-fold strategy of summoning up the violence of language and taming it, of naming the offensive words and then shifting their meaning so that the sting is drawn. As in the title, the k-word is brought into the open, the better to be neutralised and “decaffeinated” by the satirist’s art.
It’s a risky procedure. In London, Uys alarmed his producers when he proposed taking a golliwog on stage. “I said don’t ever say ‘you can’t’ because I worry when you’re frightened by something we should talk about. I used my golliwog but called him ‘my little co-star’. Whoever was offended by the word ‘golliwog’ was thinking the word themselves. I didn’t give it to them.
“You know, I want to offend everyone but I don’t want to upset anyone. The British reaction was different to the South African. In Britain there are many black minorities who are marginalised by racism; here we have a black majority with a sense of humour and great confidence. You can get away with some very dark humour, which you can’t do in other societies.”
What about his American reception? As always, Uys’s alter ego, Evita, won the day. “After three weeks in New York you don’t have the authority to speak about their lives. Whereas I said things that made the audience frown, Evita could put her finger in the pie and everybody listened.”
Would this show about South African follies have been a smug, feel-good experience for Americans? “No, no,” says Uys. “I didn’t give them the chance. I also ride on their issues, their fears. In the comedy of prejudice people laugh at their prejudice since they recognise its absurdity; suddenly they stop laughing because people are watching them as much to say: ‘Why’re you laughing?’
“It’s wonderful to make people laugh at things that frighten them.”
If Uys has long tapped into the home- grown Zeitgeist, technology is allowing him to go global: “In Darling I get news on the hour from satellite TV, so I know exactly when the world’s ending. The world’s become a village, meaning that people share the same fear: fear of losing jobs, fear of violence, fear of opinion, fear of their children. Someone farts and the stock exchange collapses. So my targets have been simplified – and become more dangerous.”
Who are his targets? “Me. My main target is me. Who the hell am I to talk about you? But if I show you 10 of my fears, you’ll recognise at least two you share. The things I want to share with audiences are things I’m passionate about – hypocrisy, and stupidity, which reinvents itself every day.
“I’m a reactor, not an actor. I don’t have a script, I don’t rehearse: I have a structure, and much of the material reflects the headlines of the afternoon. If it’s not going to be as live as Larry King, why should you see the show?”
In Dekaffirnated, the utterance of the k- word creates a cursed Earth, one that serves as a microcosm of the cursed Earth outside of the show. Uys, the high-tech shaman plugged into CNN and Sky, draws the global ghetto’s energies into himself and expunges horror in laughter.
He observes South Africa’s – and the world’s – monstrosities and wonders if he’s writing it all. Perhaps it’s the world that’s writing him.
Dekaffirnated runs at the Baxter Theatre, Rosebank, Cape Town, until November 5, from November 8 to 13 and from November 22 to 27. Tel: (021) 685-7880