PDU Talks About the DVD Collection
Q: WHAT DOES THE NUMETRO PIETER-DIRK UYS COLLECTION CONTAIN?
PDU: At present there are seven DVDs of my work that span the last 30 years
of politics and life in South Africa, reflecting the way we were and the realities
of today through the cracked mirror of humour and satire.
My first one-man show, Adapt or Dye, went onto video in 1982 and was arguably
the most successful local product for some years after its release. Highlights from
Adapt or Dye (1982) and Beyond the Rubicon (1986), with my depictions of
PW Botha, Piet Koornhof, Evita Bezuidenhout, Nowell Fine, Desmond Tutu and
Pik Botha , are to be enjoyed in BLAST FROM THE PAST.
THE GREAT COMEDY TREK explores where we were in 1992 when the lights
started going on again after decades of darkness. Nelson Mandela was free, the
negotiation process was taking place, people were stocking up on tins of tuna
and no one knew what lay ahead. On this DVD, superstar Joan Collins plays Jani
Allen, while Mangosuthu Buthulezi, Margaret Thatcher, Pik Botha and Evita
Bezuidenhout cause hilarity and relief.
FARCE ABOUT UYS (1983) features the entire Bezuidenhout family as portrayed
by Evita’s gay son De Kock, when Sersant Uys of the Security Police (Chris
Galloway) visits the South African Embassy in Bapetikosweti to grill members of
the family about irregularities in their lives. We meet Oom Hasie, Billie-Jeanne,
Izan and Ouma Ossewania, as well as Ambassador Evita Bezuidenhout. Sophie
the maid (Thoko Ntshinga) supports De Kock in his farcical ordeal amid
huge laughter.
SKATING ON THIN UYS (1985) finds Evita Bezuidenhout in a panic: oil has been
discovered in her homeland and P W Botha wants it back for South Africa. However, if Tannie Evita allows her white daughter Billie-Jeanne to marry the
terrorist son of the president of Bapetikosweti, the problem can be solved.
But apartheid and all the Bothas stand in the way! This film has a host of stars,
including Thoko Ntshinga and Chris Galloway, with special appearances by
Minister Piet Koornhof, Dr Connie Mulder, Helen Suzman and Mimi Coertse.
DEKAFFIRNATED (1999) focuses on racism and the fragility of democracy, as
illustrated by Tannie Evita’s Election Trek through the country, bringing voter
education to the people. We meet many characters along the way, including a
golliwog who wants to be un-golliwogged, an old Jewish refugee in Hillbrow,
Nowell Fine queuing up to register for the election, a sangoma on the beach in
1652, PW Botha and other delights.
FOREIGN AIDS was presented throughout South Africa, Europe, the UK, Australia
and the USA, where it was awarded the prestigious Obie in New York in 2002.
Here humour is used to highlight fear of the HI-virus and Aids, and shows us that
laughing at fear helps to make that fear less fearful. My Aids-awareness entertainment,
For Facts Sake, with its accent of safe sex and knowledge, which I have taken to
schools and over one million learners during the last 8 years, is also explored
and put into perspective.
THE END IS NAAI (2004) is inspired by where South Africa finds itself five years
into the new century. The ANC is getting more touchy about criticisms, the
honeymoon with democracy shows signs of becoming a way of life without much
fun, and politicians are like monkeys — the higher they climb the pole of ambition,
the more of their arses we can see! We meet a vast spectrum of familiar faces,
from PW Botha, through Bill Clinton, Pik, Grace Mugabe, Desmond Tutu and even
President Thabo Mbeki in conversation with the old Krokodil!
EVITA FOR PRESIDENT (2008) chronicles the unfolding presidential campaign of
the most famous white woman in South Africa, Mrs Evita Bezuidenhout, who in
2007 announced her intention to stand for the presidency of South Africa in the 2009
General Election. What was at first seen as a delightful joke has by now become a
very serious alternative. Some South Africans feel that she is the only choice.
The trauma that surrounds the ANC President Jacob Zuma only adds to the
confusion. If ‘Kill for Zuma’ has become a cry to action for some, ‘Kiss for Evita’
should provide some balance.
This Pieter-Dirk Uys comedy, filmed at the Baxter Theatre in November 2007,
will help a nation laugh at its fear. Various characters make up the
chorus line: Kadar Asmal leads a seminar on how to become acting president of the country.
Mrs Pietersen decries the fact that her coloured husband is not black enough
for affirmative action. A bergie supports his old school friend, Trevor Manuel, for
president. Kugel Nowell Fine has adopted a small Aids orphan and focuses on
the future with rubber gloves. Thabo Mbeki joins Evita Bezuidenhout in a
rousing finale where the future of South Africa becomes certain. It is just the
past that is unpredictable.
Q: WHY SO MANY OLD SHOWS?
PDU: It is said: when history repeats itself, it turns tragedy into farce. Humour is
a great weapon of mass distraction – it allows people to relax and react to
issues they often try and avoid. Apartheid was a crime and a disgrace and yet
so many of us were caught up in the web of intrigue and terror. We were all
affected, blacks and whites. Those of us who watch these DVDs in the
Pieter-Dirk Uys Collection, which highlight the obscene and absurd badness and
madness of those years, will remember and realize how far we as a nation have
come on this long walk to freedom. The young generation, who have never
experienced the terrors, horrors and farce of those apartheid years, will be
shocked by the familiarity of the racism and the ridiculousness of the cruelty.
But it is important for them to know what happened. Bad politics often reinvents
itself and comes back into society under a different name. The DVDs help us
remember the past, so that we can celebrate the present and our future with
humour.
Q: DOES THIS HUMOUR STILL WORK?
PDU: I’m not good with jokes, although I love laughing at them. I find the truth is
often funnier. And politics is sometimes too good to be true. Hypocrisy, denials
and outright lies, when exposed, can be liberatingly funny. Many politicians have to
live with their legacy of corruption and complicity and thanks to what we now have
on DVD, we can refresh our memories of what they were responsible for and react
with the ultimate punishment of contempt and laughter. Not because what
happened was funny like a joke, but because we survived it, in spite of all the
trappings of total power we were up against.
Q: HOW RELEVANT IS A SKETCH ABOUT PRESIDENT PW BOTHA TODAY?
PDU: Only in as much as it gives us details about what his history represents,
which is also our heritage. And yet, even if there are viewers who didn’t know
President PW Botha from television or parliament, his face and mannerisms,
which are part of that cartoon, are funny enough to tickle. But there is also the
irony of being in the 21st century, nearly 20 years after the PW Botha era,
and finding the president of the USA, George W Bush, saying things that PW
Botha said first. ‘He who is not for us is against us’ was part of the language
of Botha’s Rubicon denials, and he used the phrase ‘war on terror’ long before
9/11. So what we in South Africa suffered in the 1980s has now become an
international hangover. Fear is the means to an end for today’s politicians.
We gave P W Botha total power because he frightened us with words like
‘total onslaught’ and ‘terrorist’. Looking back while looking forward is
therefore not such a bad way to feel more confident about where we in South
Africa find ourselves today.
Q: SOUTH AFRICAN COMEDY? CAN IT COMPETE WITH THE REST OF THE WORLD?
PDU: We never need to compete as far as our originality is concerned. South
African comedy is unique, because it is grounded in politically incorrect issues like
racism, homophobia, chauvinism and words like ‘poep’ and ‘kak’ — totally South
African! Some funny people are vulgar and unsubtle. Other comedians are more
cerebral and unforgiving. But no matter where the laugh comes from, the
combination of our languages with their vivid descriptions, our musicality of
words and sounds, and the hysterical diversity of us as a nation of so many
flavours, colours, sounds, histories and expectations allows South African
comedy to go into areas where angels fear to tread. And yet, even angels have
sometimes been heard to laugh!
Q: IS SATIRE NOT A BIT OF AN OFF-PUT?
PDU: Satire in the 1950s and 1960s was very relevant . It was the umbrella over
ways to highlight political and social abnormalities, absurdities and crisis areas.
It was brash and loud and recognizable, because in those days the world was
relatively sane. So the clown had to have purple hair and a green nose.
Today the world is insane. Women put bombs in prams with their baby to blow up in a
supermarket. So because the world now has purple hair and a green nose, the
clown must be real. Satire doesn’t have the same meaning in today’s
merry-go-round of political ups and downs. But most people associate the word
with laughing at politicians and politics — and that’s alright by me.
Q: IS EVITA BEZUIDENHOUT PAST HER SELL-BY DATE?
PDU: If she was a product on a supermarket shelf, yes. I’d spray her with Doom
and call in pest control! But Evita Bezuidenhout’s been around since 1980.
Not static, not just representing that era, but adapting and not dying. Evita came
at a time when South Africans needed an outlet for their reaction to fear and
frustration. They laughed at her for many reasons: the Boere Tannie, the
braai-baroque clothes, the upwards inflections — alles oulik en fraai. She was
part of the Afrikaner elite, the BEE tribe of that time who plundered the
nation in the name of their so-called democracy. Tannie Evita had a blade in
her smile. She would expose the culprits of carelessness through her naive
support and racist ‘Christian’ attitudes. She was also a theatrical concoction,
a man who was dressed up as a woman. In the 1980s that was not just against
the law. It was also funny!
Politics took Evita out of the safety zone of the theatre. When the homeland
fiasco was launched in the early 1980s, it presented her with a job as South
African Ambassador to the fictitious homeland of Bapetikosweti, soon more
famous than the real Bantustans. Evita became the Madonna of her chorus line of
political clowns, from Pik Botha, through PW Botha, Piet Koornhof, Magnus
Malan and all the other real players on the blood-soaked stage of South African
politics.
When in 1994 democracy swallowed her homeland and her job, she happily retired
to the kitchen and true to the slogan ‘Boer maak ‘n plan’, cooked for the new
leadership of her country. Her black grandchildren reflect her dilemma as a
famous white Christian Afrikaans member of a defunct and disgraced National
Party, now trying to convince as a designer democrat and reconciled to a future
without privilege based on the colour of her skin. She is now the delighted gogo
to her liewe swart kabouters. And as the waters of the new Rubicon swirl round
the ankles of comrades, communists and cabinet ministers, Evita Bezuidenhout
has made herself available for the presidency of South Africa in 2009. So she will
always be relevant. The politics of the day will lead her. All I have to do is keep>
her trim, elegant, up to date and real. Let the women recognize the woman and
the men forget the man!
Q: ARE THERE ANY NEW SHOWS TO BE ADDED TO THE PIETER-DIRK UYS COLLECTION IN
2009?
PDU: In 1994 MNET presented a 12 part series called Funigalore directed by
Pieter Cilliers. In this series, Evita Bezuidenhout interviews the most prominent
politicians of the day – from Pik Botha and Piet Koornhof to Tokyo Sexwale, Cyril
Ramaphosa and Nelson Mandela. From icon to aikona – or vice versa. The
series was a unique way to introduce our new leaders to a nation still unsure of
what democracy would bring. The entire series is being released on DVD.
Julian Shaw is a teenager from New Zealand who came to Cape Town and
followed me around with his camera when I visited schools with my
Aids-awareness entertainment ‘For Facts Sake’. His documentary film,
DARLING! THE PIETER-DIRK UYS STORY (www.darlingmovie.com.au),
is a unique voice of youth on my work, on South Africa’s struggle against
denialism and stigma and on the passion and optimism that our young people
exude. The film won the DOCNZ Best Film award at the Australasia International
Film festival, was one of the top 5 international films at the South African
Encounters Festival, and most recently Julian was awarded the Independent
Spirit Award 2007. DARLING! THE PIETER-DIRK UYS STORY will be released
on DVD by NuMetro and screened by MNET soon.