26 Feb - 10 March 2013
Political Satire

In our world of reality TV, breaking news, 400 television channels to surf through, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and SMS, choice has become the cherry on the cake of entertainment. Pieter-Dirk Uys has prepared four hours of performance choices to present nightly, and every night will be a different show of 90 minutes, because the audience decides what they want!

It could be Evita Bezuidenhoutas a new ANC cadre, or Nowell Fine celebrating forty years in the public eye. Maybe a Malema in Gucci or chains, some Zumas married or not, one or two Mandelas, a Tutu, a PW or a Pik. What about Mother Theresa making sure that Jesus will only return if the ANC stays in power? Even a chorus line of former NP leaders chanting the old National anthem. A virtual Ha-Ha-History Channel. With the choice of fifteen boxes on stage, a member of the audience chooses a number. Out come charactersand  entertainment that could be either a drama, a comedy, a farce or a shocking expose. Every box holds a familiar secret! Every laugh truly South African!

Meet those in our Rainbow Nation who will help us laugh at our fear of an unchartered future. Pieter-Dirk Uys presents a celebration of free speech, an orgy of laughing at sacred cows, an embrace of being in a relatively healthy young democracy. Come and enjoy it all while it lasts. A different show each night, depending on the choices of the audience, might force future thought-police to buy tickets for each show, just in case a State Secret is let out of a box!

Tuesdays to Saturdays at 8pm, Sundays at 3pm. Tickets via Computicket @ R140 throughout.

From a review from National Arts Festival Grahamstown Thursday 5 July 2012:
An Audience with Pieter-Dirk Eish! by Charl Blignaut

“The 66-year-old satirist Pieter-Dirk Uys strolled onto the Monument’s main stage last night in a black leather jacket to perform to a packed-to-capacity audience of aging white groupies and throngs of school kids. He left to a standing ovation. The reason for the love had less to do with his performance  and more to do with his heartfelt use of his platform to deliver a very particular message in between the impersonations that have cast him as an obstreperous national treasure.

Uys offered the audience the opportunity to structure his routine by selecting numbered boxes. Each contained a skit or character. The first box selected was empty. It was a one-liner about the ANC’s service delivery. After that we got Bambi Kellermann, the erotic and uninhibited younger sister of Evita Bezuidenhout, based in Germany. Bambi did sex education. She did contraceptives and penis size and bananas and tricked the audience into laughing while demonstrating how to apply a condom: “the wrong way round and it looks like a Basotho hat”.

Uys then took the audience back to 1975 and his Grahamstown presentation of Strike Up the Banned to remind us of when he was not allowed to say the things he was saying now. Then we got Nowell Fine, the mother ship of kugels, who disliked apartheid even more than she disliked blacks, has aged. She is bewildered and defiant. But she loves her ANC more than she loves her ex-pats. We got Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela and KgalemaMotlanthe and Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma in sunglasses and a shower cap. But really what we got was a deeply concerned Uys.

He is concerned about Aids. He is concerned about dwindling theatre audiences and about the threat to our freedom of expression in light of The Spear. He is particularly concerned about the Protection of State Information bill. Drawing to a close, he shared that the festival had asked him to present something he had never shown before. He said yes, “if you can give me nine months.” Jokes aside, the numbered boxes, he declared, are a secret weapon. They are there to confuse the secret police this time next year. They will have to keep coming to the show to see which boxes are opened that night as each box contains a national secret – “because it’s our right to know”. As an artist who has been banned, censored and threatened in the past, he suggests history may be repeating itself.
“If I do these jokes, will I go to jail next year?”

'An Audience with Pieter-Dirk Eish!' was funny and camp the whole way through – and it was also deadly serious.”