Afrikaner Queen

Dirk-Uys as Evita Bezuidenhout with Nelson Mandela
10 April 2012

My first scheduled interview with Pieter-Dirk Uys didn't happen for a very good reason. South Africa's elections were due to take place the next day and the country's pre-eminent satirist was called away to do some urgent filming. By the time we finally hook up, it's the morning after the vote and Uys is buoyant, enjoying another landslide victory for the African National Congress, 10 years after the end of Apartheid.

The cheerful, passionate 58-year-old is understandably delighted. 'It's been a hell of a few days,' he grins. 'It's a thrill to see how we've grown up in 10 years.' The victory was expected, but there was still anxiety over whether violence would break out. 'It has been surprisingly peaceful, compared to 1994 when many people lost their lives. We have become as dull and as boring as any other democracy.'

Dull and boring is hardly something you could say about Uys, though. The bubbly performer boasts strikingly accurate impressions of Winnie Mandela and Desmond Tutu in his repertoire but is best known for his towering high-heeled creation, Evita Bezuidenhout, a regular on everything from variety shows to current affairs talk-ins. In recent weeks Evita interviewed the main political leaders on breakfast television. Think Tony Blair interviewed by Mrs Merton and you get the picture.

Uys's alter ego has a way of catching politicians off guard. 'They wouldn't allow me in but will talk to her,' he laughs. 'I'm not there to trap them, but they can't help looking stupid when she asks the questions.' In 1994, after Nelson Mandela became President, Evita interviewed him, too. For once someone else had the upper hand. 'He had a wonderful sense of humour.' Uys breaks into a trilling Mandela impersonation: 'Ooh Evita, you are soo beautiful.'

Evita has been Uys's Trojan horse for more than 25 years. The inevitable comparison is with Barry Humphries' Edna Everage, but that does not do Evita justice. 'We are both middleaged men with good legs, but that's where it starts and ends,' he says. 'Evita is very much a political beast, a cross between Margaret Thatcher, Eva Braun and Evita Peron.' Uys created her for a newspaper column in 1978 and found that she could express views about the racist leadership led by P.W. Botha that he would not be allowed to air. Two years later he donned a wig, took her onstage and she's been wowing audiences with her universally recognisable mix of snobbery and stupidity ever since.

One reason for Evita's success, says Uys, was that the reality of Apartheid was kept from ordinary white citizens. Uys himself, who had a Jewish-German mother and an Afrikaner father, only discovered the extent of it when he came to London to study at the capital's Film School in the late Sixties.

'Censorship was totally successful,' he explains. 'It was only seeing English documentaries about what the Afrikaner police were doing that made me realise what was going on.' When he returned he became active in political theatre. 'In drama you always focus on the truth, no matter what the story is.' But he moved very quickly from straight acting into satire with a little help from Evita. 'I realised that humour was going to be my weapon of choice. My government had no sense of humour at all, so hopefully I'd drive them so crazy they'd all have heart attacks and die! All my plays were banned but it was difficult to ban my solo revues because it was so hard to put their finger on what to ban. Evita was criticising me herself, talking about writing letters to the Minister Of Police saying that they should lock up Pieter-Dirk Uys. What could they do? Arrest her for heavy sarcasm?'

British irreverence was also an inspiration. In the early Eighties he would smuggle videos back home after UK appearances and everyone he knew who had a player would receive a copy. One of his particular favourites was Spitting Image, which

used to do a particularly brutal send-up of bovver boy Botha.

As Apartheid crumbled, Uys felt redundant but delighted. 'When Mandela came out of jail it freed me,' he remembers. 'I wasn't going to make fun of the most important human being of the last two centuries. But politicians always come to my rescue. They are like monkeys, the higher they climb the pole of ambition the more of their arses you can see. After two years I was back in business with democracy as my target, and by the end of the century I realised it was HIV and Aids.'

President Thabo Mbeki's belief that HIV and Aids are unconnected inspired Uys to send Evita on a non-stop schedule of sex education gigs in schools and prisons. Uys supports Mbeki's ANC party but happily lampoons its leader. Of the difference between South African and British politicians, he says, 'here they go to jail first and then go into government, in Britain it is the other way round.'

As a centrepiece of this month's London Comedy Festival, Uys will be presenting a new, celebratory work looking at South Africa 10 years on. 'The world expected us to become Rwanda the sequel, but the generous black majority did not put whites against the wall and shoot them.' The show is called Elections And Erections - 'the two things that were illegal throughout most of my life. Democracy and sex.'

His sister Tessa is a respected London-based concert pianist, but Pieter-Dirk has never considered leaving his homeland permanently. 'Not in the bad times and certainly not now in the better times.' He remains based on the West coast in a small town amusingly called Darling, where he has built his own theatre from a railway station, called Evita Se Perron - Perron means platform in Afrikaans.

While his previous sell-out UK shows have predominantly attracted homesick ex-pats, Uys is keen to convey that Elections And Erections is aimed at everyone. 'I have a lot of baggage, I'm a gay man in high heels and eyelashes, but I think it is part of the fun for audiences in other countries to be surprised how much they recognise. The world has become a very small place.'

Elections And Erections, Mon 10-Sat 29 May, Soho Theatre, 21 Dean Street, W1 (0870 429 6883).

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