An Audience with Pieter Dirk Eish!
DIRECTOR: Pieter-Dirk Uys
CAST: Pieter-Dirk Uys
VENUE: Theatre on the Bay
UNTIL: March 23
RATING: ****
Pieter-Dirk Uys’ weapon of mass distraction – razor-sharp satire of great intelligence – is fully functional in the intimacy of Theatre on the Bay – an intimacy conducive to entertainment in which the audience plays a significant.
Inspired by the popular Pick-A-Box show, this interactive comedy evolves according to choices made by audience members invited to select a numbered container on the stage, so not even Uys can be sure what is going to happen next… which injects the freshness of unpredictability into the proceedings.
Each of the 20 boxes/bags holds the props or costume for a character sketch or the enactment of a story. Some are familiar, some new, but their common denominator is the rich texture of South African life, past present and future. All of it is thought-provoking. Uys takes on whatever is thrown at him with the equanimity of an artist thoroughly at ease with his material and confident of his ability to improvise when needed. Even the most hackneyed portrayals elicited by his audience are refreshed by contemporary reference, and it comes as no surprise that the obligatory request to turn off cellphones is enlivened by comment on the latest controversy surrounding interrupted signals in Parliament.
Much of the show’s enjoyment is derived from watching Uys’s deft metamorphosis from his simply clad self into a variety of personae, from the finger-wagging PW Botha to the voluble, querulous Nowell Fine, with many another in between.
Nothing is guaranteed except the appearance of that sine qua non of an Uys show, Evita Bezuidenhout, who is impersonated as the finale if her number has not come up earlier in the evening. Her latest appendage is a foundling of questionable parentage who bears a close resemblance to someone named Julius.
Despite the irrepressible zest, humour and variety of Uys’s aleatory portrait gallery, one of the most memorable features of this latest An Audience... is the prefatory monologue by the satirist, which is not governed by audience choice.
With engaging candour, he shares his first experience of the theatre which became his lifelong passion (a staging of King Lear which he viewed at age 12 when in grade 7) – and he acknowledges the role of audiences in thespian art, since without them, there is no point in perform-ance. Furthermore, each show takes its character from the energy generated by audience reaction, making it subtly different every night.
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