Evita passes the torch in Darling
Locals step in to save and expand Uys’s quirky Evita se Perron
● He lampooned apartheid policies and poked fun at everybody from Pik Botha to Desmond Tutu. But there’s nothing funny about Covid-19, which has brought the curtain down on Pieter-Dirk Uys’s famous theatre in the small Swartland town of Darling.
SA’s favourite satirist, better known as Tannie Evita Bezuidenhout, said he had no option but to cancel shows for 10 months of last year and sell the theatre he started 25 years ago in the town’s former railway station.
However, Uys, whose burlesque alter ego was once the ambassador of fictional apartheid bantustan Bapetikosweti, isn’t done yet. He still lives in Darling and intends continuing his shows as soon as Covid protocols allow.
He is also keeping a close eye on renovations as new owners look to expand Evita se Perron, the tiny Uys-inspired homeland of Afrikaner counterculture that put Darling on the international tourist map.
“I usually had 90 performances scheduled per year. Then in mid-March it all came to a grinding halt,” Uys told the Sunday Times this week. “The staff were retrenched. All future plans put on hold.”
It seemed to be the end of an era for Uys, whose political satire has irked politicians across the political spectrum, notably former president PW Botha, but whose longer list of admirers includes Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu and former apartheid justice minister Piet Koornhof.
The Covid lockdown travel ban also threatened the future of the famous Perron, which has grown from a small theatre into a tourist precinct with its own “Boerassic Park” garden and “museum/nauseum” of theatrical and apartheid-era oddities.
Then a chance meeting last year in the local Spar turned adversity into opportunity: two local businessmen, Frits van
Ryneveld and Hentie van der Merwe, offered to buy the property. It turned out to be much more than a rescue mission as they decided not only to preserve Uys’s legacy but, with his help, expand upon it. They have installed an exhibition of Evita’s most famous outfits, including the dress she wore when presenting thenpresident Mandela with a basket of koeksisters. They have also begun work cataloguing the treasure trove of museum artifacts that continues to grow with a stream of new donations.
The couple are also upgrading the Nkosi Sikelel’ restaurant and rusk factory, as well as a deli where they sell their Darling Sweet toffee brand. They are now producing a Tannie Evita classic flavour toffee.
“We started talking right there in the Spar queue buying toilet paper,” said Uys. “They have combined their brand with the Perron’s attractions and I am delighted to watch my becalmed venue re-emerge from the mothballs of Covid and reinvent itself for the new world audience.
“I have Tannie Evita on standby and ready for the moment bums come back to seats and no-one is scared if anyone sneezes or poeps.”
Van der Merwe, who gave up his teaching post at Stellenbosch University to focus on the Darling business, described the project as “more like a partnership [with Uys]. He comes in every morning at 9am — he is very routine — and gives us advice on how he thinks it should be done and we talk about it.
We feel very lucky. It still feels like his place because that is how we want it to be. ”
The Perron was also a reminder of what Uys and some of his peers came to represent — a critical voice at a time when many feared to speak out against apartheid.
Said Ryneveld: “To me this is also about realising that some of the staunchest antiapartheid activists were also Afrikaners. We identify with that — it is almost like a moral compass.”
Uys said he had no intention of reining in Tannie Evita, who at 85 is a decade older than Uys and is set to reveal a new octogenarian look — a departure from her trademark ’80s perms. “What does an 85-year-old icon do in lockdown when she cannot get to her weekly hair appointment? She adapts and does not dye.”