The echo of a noise
A memoir of then and now
by
PIETER-DIRK UYS
Tafelberg
Dedicated to that smile which helped to change the world
In the foyer
‘South Africa belongs to all who
live in it, united in our diversity.’
– from the preamble to the
South African Constitution
I’ve decided to print all the pictures in this book in black and white, knowing that readers will allow their imagination to see the colour in each one. For me, having grown up in a black and white country where ‘Whites Only’ ruled my existence, the above snap represents one of the small signposts that changed my life.
I am on the rocks at Bloubergstrand looking towards Robben Island. Table Mountain is there as it was every day of my life, and yet each day looking different – naked rock in sunshine or misted up by cloud, like a play with a new audience each time, always fresh and shockingly intrusive. I might have worn a T-shirt saying ‘The first day of the rest of my life’. For it is 11 February 1990. Possibly at that very moment, former prisoner 466/64 Nelson R. Mandela was walking to freedom from Victor Verster Prison after 27 years, hand in hand with his wife Winnie.
The most famous person in the world would soon become my president, democratically elected by the people of my country. On this day Mandela freed me from my jail of prejudice and fear, and on 27 April 1994, for the first time ever, I was legally allowed to queue up with anybody. Who says life cannot start at fifty? My job as political satirist had come to an unexpected but celebrated end. But only for a few days: Nelson Mandela’s sense of humour would soon inspire me to find the ‘mock’ in democracy and expose the ‘con’ in reconciliation.
I hope the journey to this moment can entertain and illuminate and, while we all know there is a happy ending, reveal the small signposts in my life that changed so much. The big billboards of death, terror, fear and glory force major changes in life, and there were enough of them to remember. It was only through exposing the small signposts while researching this memoir that I started to understand a familiar childhood as it developed into a personality. I now, at last, have come to know the most difficult character among the eighty or so I have performed on stage in my chorus line of creatures, clowns and criminals.
Me.
Finding the right light
I build sandcastles when the tide is out.
That’s what I should say when people ask me, ‘Pieter-Dirk Uys? What do you actually do?’ I tell them that I write plays and perform in revues. My work is called satirical, but I need it to be entertaining as well, so I’m not the perfect example of a satirist – the taker of no prisoners. I write stories and sometimes they end up on stage in dramatic form. Some were banned by the censors of a bygone government. Often they just sat on the shelf, waiting for the right moment to take form and shape. Now one has to seduce social media, get on the global internet highway where your work can join the billions of other blips of hashtag life taking refuge in the Cloud. But in essence what I do is just build sandcastles while the tide is out. Unique structures that delight and confuse, and attract attention until the tide turns back, and the castle becomes a lump of wetness, no more than a treasured memory. Live theatre is one of the few inspiring things not yet in a tin or on a disc or in the Cloud. It is from my mouth to your ear.
I was in the tenth grade at Hoërskool Nassau when I caught the theatre virus. Our English teacher, Miss Nel, took our class to Cape Town to the Little Theatre to see that year’s setwork on stage. It was King Lear. William Shakespeare was a challenge for a class of Afrikaans kids. We were more excited by the experience of going into town in the evening by train, not even in school uniform – not to the bioscope, but to a theatre. Sitting in the auditorium on red velvet seats, we waited as the place filled up with people dressed in their best. They were all white; it was 1962.
The lights slowly dimmed to darkness and the green velvet curtain hissed up into the sky. And there was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen: lights brighter than I had ever imagined with colours deep and vivid and so alive. And the people on stage? No, they were not people, not mere actors. They were gods and goddesses in wonderful clothes, presenting us with the story of King Lear and his daughters in a language that was called English. It often didn’t sound like the one I spoke yet I knew what they meant. I identified most with the character of the Fool, and I also fancied Goneril’s dresses.
There were lords and ladies, dukes, duchesses and earls, kings and queens, and when they left the stage, I knew they got into carriages and on horses to gallop off to the castle on the hill, to prepare for the next battle in this great drama of King Lear. I didn’t know at that age that when actors left the stage, they sat down backstage, lit a cigarette (it was 1962) and muttered: ‘Oh God, darling, what a kak audience!’ That night must have stayed with me, for when I eventually finished school and nine months’ military training, I enrolled at the University of Cape Town to get a degree to fall back on.
Do they still say that? ‘Get a degree to fall back on’? When will we start saying, ‘Get a degree to fall forward on!’ Why always this retreat mentality? ‘Your dream will never come true, so get a degree to fall back on.’ So, after four years I had my BA (Drama) degree, probably the most pointless and useless thing I own, because when you’re on a stage, no one will ask you for a degree. You can either do it, or you can’t do it. There is no affirmative action in the theatre, no BEE; just doing. Or as Noël Coward put it: ‘Speak clearly and don’t bump into the furniture.’
I wish I could say proudly that everything I learnt about theatre I absorbed at university, somehow managing to get to the right lectures, finding all those important books in the library, but that’s not quite true. Everything I learnt happened while I was an usher at the old Hofmeyr Theatre during the late 1960s. During the day I was a student, but at night I was dressed in my penguin suit with a bow tie, tearing the tickets of the whites-only patrons, selling them the programmes listing the whites-only performers on stage, and pointing them to the whites-only toilets. Because it was a whites-only world in those days.
Then when the play started, I would stand at the back of the auditorium holding the remaining programmes. I watched the play every night, up to seven performances a week in a three-week run. Same play every night, but never the same experience. Every night it was a different performance, because there was a different audience. And so, the laughs were in new places, the energy varied – the whole dramatic onslaught adapted itself for each nightly wave of humanity, who were ready to break into wild applause at the end of a unique experience. That was my first lesson in building sandcastles while the tide is out.
In the twenty-first century I am still an usher, but also a stage manager, theatre owner, dramatist, satirist, ‘drag queen’ (for those who don’t realise that the proper word is ‘actor’), publicist, optimist and eighty people on stage. One man alone on stage, over seven thousand times, and each time is the first time and the last time. Why? Because there is a new live audience, waiting to go wherever the player will take them. Each one happy to be left abandoned when it’s all over and the green velvet curtain has slid down into place, and cherishing the memory of the magic, ready to tell others about the passion and celebration being shared with them.
‘And so, Pieter-Dirk Uys, what do you actually do?’
Gathering