South African satirist Pieter-Dirk Uys was on Monday night awarded a prestigious Obie at the 49th Annual Village Voice Obie Awards held in New York.
This coveted Off-Broadway accolade was presented to Uys for his one-man show Foreign Aids that he performed at the legendary La Mama Theatre last year.
Foreign Aids features the bewigged Evita Bezuidenhout and her sister — whom she loathes — Bambi Kellerman, a sex worker who had to strip in Europe and Soho during the 1960s and 1970s so she can tell it like it is. The show’s message is that South Africa will lose 40% of its people in just 20 years if it does not get the Aids message.
Uys’s show Elections & Erections, which he is performing in London at the Soho Theatre, has also been acclaimed by the British critics and will transfer to the Duchess Theatre in London’s West End for an extra week, June 1 to 5.
Michael Billington of The Guardian gave Foreign Aids a maximum of five stars: ”The great thing about Uys’s brilliant one-man show is his moral discrimination. While welcoming democracy and paying tribute to Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, he remains passionately angry about the inertia that allows 600 people a day to die of Aids. And Uys’s attacks on [South African President Thabo] Mbeki’s attitude to Aids, especially, prove that satire can be a positive force for good.”
Bruce Dessau of the Evening Standard said: ”Behind the frocks and smiles, this satire has more bite than a rabid Rottweiler.”
Stephanie Merritt of The Observer said: ”Uys remains a robust and vigorous stage presence. Most strikingly by being rooted in compassion rather than cynicism, his polemic strikes more forcefully than that of many politicised entertainers. This is not light entertainment, but it needs to be said, and no other performer could say it with such flair and conviction.”
”A thought-provoking, moving and personal piece of satirical theatre of the kind we see all too rarely these days,” was the comment of the internet UK Comedy Guide, while Chris Bartlett in The Stage wrote: ”It is testament to his skills as a performer and the regard in which he is held, that Uys can deliver such chilling material while still using his devilish wit to find humour in the bleakest of corners.”
The South African version of the show The End Is Naai opens at Pieter Toerien’s Theatre on the Bay in Camps Bay, in Cape Town, on July 6 for a short season. – I-Net Bridge