SELL-BY DATE: Uys lays it all on the table

Old age is the joke life plays on us. The price for all that rude health and beauty of youth.

As our exterior, sum of experiences, character adaptations, losses, and the interminable shift in other’s perceptions gather, our willing hearts and memory of youth’s opportunity as recent as the dawn makes terminal fun of us. But what’s the alternative?

And so Pieter-Dirk Uys, our satirist extraordinaire, a lancer of our national boils, chooses, after four decades of dressing up and dressing down leaders from PW Botha to Julius Malema, does perhaps the only thing left to do: take off his own clothes. After all, the politicians surrounding us have determinedly stripped themselves of dignity to the point they’re essentially naked now. Nakedly greedy, nakedly corrupt, nakedly incompetent. If they just tried to pretend a bit, if they acknowledged the existence of some moral code, the robe could be pulled off them. But no, there’s barely a thread left.

Which had Pieter seeming somewhat resigned; he, who is on first name terms with Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela, to say nothing of Bambi Kellerman and Evita Bezuidenhout, making a dark, almost offhand warning: 2024 is our last chance.

Of course he helps us to laught at it – not our last chance, that is no laughing matter – our complicity, our idiocy. A laughter that offers hope. Yet the harder you laugh, the closer you are to weeping.

I have a confession to make. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Pieter-Dirk Uys show. Not in a theater, at least, and so not a fully rehearsed and titled production. But I’ve seen him, and Evita Bezuidenhout, so many times it feels like I’ve seen many of his shows. Not the same thing. Thus I can’t judge whether SELL-BY DATE had less laughter than others. Whether Pieter wasn’t being more of a storyteller and less of a performer. But it was poignant and beautiful as he poked the finger backwards, going woke and cancelling his bergie character which was, admittedly uncomfortable in a way it wouldn’t have been 20, even 10, years ago.

Which is sad, as in Pieter’s hands it’s less a caricature and more a homage to a character; a particularly Cape Town character, an aristrocat of the street. And with him, places disappear.

But yes, things have changed. Covid changed us.

Pieter speaks about Covid, using the time to go through all his costumes. Of course he goes through some of them with us; they are old friends. And Pieter is old. He admits it. Makes no attempt to appear otherwise. And to see him lying on a table, doing his knee exercises, die hart raak ‘n bietjie seer.

SELL-BY DATE is a courageous, vulnerable, masterful performance by an actor who forms part of our cultural life and lexicon. There may have been a ‘best before’, but Pieter has no sell-by date.Pieter-Dirk Uys’s Sell-by Date is playing at Theatre on the Bay until 10 June.