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The Review - THEATRE by JOHN COURTNEY O'CONNOR
Published: 9 August 2007

Pieter-Dirk Uys in Evita For President

Evita, the man for president

EVITA FOR PRESIDENT
Tricycle Theatre

“I ASKED for a Paris Hilton, not a Boris Johnson,” exclaims an august Evita to her imaginary hairdresser. Evita is satirist and female impersonator Pieter-Dirk Uys’s alter ego, in this one-man show.
Uys has written and performed 20 plays and more than 30 reviews and is associated with South Africa’s seminal theatres of the 1970s and 1980s – Cape Town’s Space Theatre and the Market Theatre in Johannesburg. Born in Cape Town, and having survived the mediocrity of Apartheid kultuur, he now exposes the bones of that dinosaur and also casts a critical eye at South Africa’s recently elected politician.
Uys has been travelling round South Africa since 2002 and visiting more than 800 schools plus prisons and reformatories with free Aids-awareness entertainment entitled For Facts Sake.
Evita Bezuidenhout is a middle-aged Afrikaans suburbanite – a South African Edna Everidge but thankfully without Barry Humphries’ petty-bourgeois baggage.
She will be standing for President in 2009.
The concept for Uys’s show is simple: a black backdrop and a semi-circle of chairs each used for the character’s costume; the performer changes personas before the audience.
There is an array of politicians including Desmond Tutu, Mandela and PK Botha.
The finale is the character of Evita, when the performer seemed at his most relaxed.
This is interesting, witty and thoughtful entertainment and a journey with which most Britons are unfamiliar.
Until September 1

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