PIETER-DIRK UYS RETURNS TO THE BAXTER THEATRE
After
a sell out season earlier this year, Pieter-Dirk Uys returns with his acclaimed
one man memoir The Echo of a Noise, this time to
the Baxter Theatre, from 29 November 2016.
Having
performed alone on the stages of the world for well over seven thousand times,
Pieter-Dirk Uys has learnt that every show is the first and the last
performance – because each audience demands and gets a different energy,
topicality and excitement. Now in his 71st year, he doesn't
glance back at the successes and failures that have strengthened his belief in
a constant improvement of his work, but at those small signposts that
throughout his life subconsciously have pointed him in a right and original
direction – his father Hannes Uys, his mother Helga Bassel, his grandmothers,
his teachers, his passions; Sophia Loren, censorship, false eyelashes and
making a noise when everyone demanded silence.
South
Africa’s foremost satirist sits on a barstool, wearing his black beanie on
his head and his Almost Famous sweatshirt, and with his
impish smile, he even looks like a naughty goblin trapped by the spotlight.
Within minutes he fills the auditorium with his presence. This is just
Pieter-Dirk Uys speaking and he opens his heart and talks about his private and
public life. The big hair and silky repartee of Evita Bezuidenhout or the smoky
drone of the sexy Bambi Kellermann have been stored elsewhere for some other
time. It soon becomes clear that the title of his autobiographical one-man
memoir, The Echo of a Noise, doesn't really do justice to what
he presents here. He leads you into his inner sanctuary, takes you through our
history and shows where what is public and private meet.
Uys
was and still is a voice in the wilderness, ever since he first appeared
fearlessly on a stage in the 1970s. He jokes that the all-powerful censor board
was his own personal public relations department. And how brilliantly they
banned his work: even to the extent of declaring a word Uys invented as
obscene, a word that they couldn't find in any dictionary. We hear the
recording of the voice of little Pietertjie Uys singing like an angel and
accompanied on the piano by his father, Hannes Uys, whom he would accompany on
Sundays to the church where Hannes was organist – the father whom he loved, but
didn’t like very much; the sternest critic of his work and yet the one who
could also give good advice. He tells of his father’s last moments, being with
him as he died and then going back to the family home where Sannie, the
housekeeper and his 'Cape Flats mother', asked if there wasn’t any washing from
‘Pa’. The audience is spellbound as he shares the suicide of his German mother,
Helga, as well as the influences on him of his Afrikaans and German
grandmothers.
It’s
as if Uys constantly takes his audience into his confidence and so breaks all
the rules and crosses boundaries. He remains a master storyteller who can make
as much fun of himself as he does with the others who get a lashing from his
sharp tongue.
The
Echo of Noise is at the Baxter Golden
Arrow Studio Theatre from 29 November to 17 December 2016. Shows run nightly
from Tuesday to Saturday at 8:15pm with matinees on Saturdays at 5:15pm.
The show on 16 December is at 5:30pm. Tickets cost R130 to R150 via Computicket
or 08619158000. - release from
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