White privilege targeted
Satire and criticism aimed at the former ruling class ensure laughs at festival
WELCOMING the audience to a screening of SkatingonThinUys, Evita Bezuidenhout joked about the Grahamstown premiere 30 years ago, back when winter was winter.
“I don’t know about this summer,” she said, referring to the mild weather outside.
But, she was there to screen a film that hadn’t seen the light of day in three decades, and it turned out that yesteryear’s satire is unfortunately still funny today.
While the film ripped into apartheid structures and white privilege, the uncomfortable thing was that we still make the same jokes today, about white people behaving badly.
Pieter-Dirk Uys was one of the featured artists on this year’s main programme at the National Arts Festival, and attracted mixed audiences, and fans, whenever he went outside the theatres. Everyone wanted a picture with Tannie Evita, from PR types, to the security guard to Festinos.
While his guise as the retired ambassador and now friendly gogo has softened his shtick over the years, his political satire still appeals across age, gender and race at the festival.
Conrad Koch and his puppet, Chester Missing, are also packing them in, selling out shows right up to the weekend.
Koch is aware, and constantly speaking about, how he as a white man tries to ride on the success of the racially ambiguous puppet, who mostly talks about him, the white guy.
Ewok, rapper, musician and some time poet (AKA Iain Robinson from Durban), also stepped onto the main programme for the first time this year.
His excellent wordplay covered every topic, from the fuss about the Rhodes statue at UCT to the depreciation of the rand.
He structured his show around white guilt and laid it on thick, directly addressing people in the audience, saying whites need to say sorry before they can move on. “Borrow me your language, I’ve only ever heard ‘please help me’, I’ve never had to say it,” he begged, before acknowledging: “I get to pick like a vulture at the culture of others.”
Director Tara Notcutt and her trio of fine actors – Albert Pretorius, Rob van Vuuren and James Cairns – delivered the darkness with a cynical take on the local justice system in ThreeBlindMice, sparing nothing and no one in their quest to lay it bare and ask what is going on.
But, for the most part, satire at this year’s festival, at least on the main programme, was aimed at white privilege, ignoring all other current social ills.
The big question though, is whether it reached the target audience.