Not made up

Debbie Hathway talks to SA’s foremost satirist, Pieter-Dirk Uys, about his new show, a one-man memoir of his life

For the first time in over four decades of show business, PieterDirk Uys is shedding the grease paint, false nails, big hair and high heels that have helped mould his career as SA’s foremost satirist, to get a little (or a lot) more personal in his autobiographical one-man memoir, The Echo of a Noise.

“In 40 years of performance, I’ve never done something like this,” says Uys. “I’ve always written shows with characters and had various masks to wear and security blankets to hide behind, but this time it’s just me and you.”

He began to conceptualise the production once he had the name. “I always start with the title,” says Uys, “and I thought: what does it mean? Have I become the echo of a noise of the past? Or am I the echo of a noise reinventing itself for the future? Or is it the noise of my life — the music I grew up with because both my parents were concert pianists and Mozart was my best friend? Or was it the noise from arguments I had with my father? Or was it the noise of the National Party government saying ‘shut up, you may not do this’ and me saying ‘I will, I will, I will’?”

At once candid and intimate, Uys shares his memories as only a master storyteller can — with passion, humour, intelligence and great sensitivity — while he reflects on his life, growing up in SA; his parents; his “coloured mother” from Athlone (near Cape Town) who looked after him for years and taught him to “speak Afrikaans properly with all the swear words — and changed so much of my life”; breaking down the barriers of “separate development” with humour; being “half Jewish, half German, half Afrikaans”.

Uys describes his father as a great jazz pianist and organist, an extrovert — Oom Hannes, whom everybody loved, but “Pa was the one I fought with”. “We didn’t love each other; we didn’t even like each other.