Eish, now you can pick a box with Uys
SATIRIST Pieter-Dirk Uys hopes to inspire his Nelson Mandela Bay audience to look forward to the upcoming national elections with excitement and optimism. His new show, An Audience with
Pieter-Dirk EISH, will be staged at the Boardwalk Vodacom Amphitheatre next week. Uys will also launch his new book,
Panorama, at 5pm on Thursday at the Boardwalk Hotel’s Kipling’s Brasserie.
For the first time, the audience would be able to choose the structure of their show for themselves, Uys said.
"Usually I start in trousers as PW Botha and end up in a dress as Evita Bezuidenhout, but here I must go where the audience points. There are 14 boxes on stage, each with a sketch, a story, characters and comedy which is very South African – and in many cases reflecting the politics of where we come from and where we are.
"And it is funny and full of politicians! A real Pick-a-Box show! (Or Kies-’n-Doos?)”
Uys said while he wanted to inspire the audience, he also wanted them to "to leave having had a great night of laughter, recognition, maybe some shock at the satire and hopefully not too offended to be able to laugh at ourselves”.
The 67-year-old performer said he was looking forward to a full venue in Port Elizabeth.
Uys, almost better known as his alter ego, Evita, said his new book,
Panorama , available at Fogarty's, was set on Robben Island in 1987 when a young black woman is allowed to visit her ailing father, a political prisoner.
"She stays overnight in the house of the two white schoolteachers who, like so many of us at that time, are terrified of having the 'enemy' in their home.
It turns out to be a life-changing experience for them all.
"The 2009-part story is when the young black woman, now mother of two born-free sons, returns to the island with them.
"So it's the Old SA and the New SA – and the linking image is Table Mountain, the view from Robben Island which is everyone's panorama. Except those in the cells.”
Tickets for the October 3 and 4 show are R150 each and are available from Computicket.
