Pieter-Dirk Uys

South African satirist Pieter-Dirk Uys is still finding the 'mock' in democracy and exposing the 'con' in reconciliation. He returns to London, this time without his usual armour of false eyelashes, extreme characters and their sketches which helped to deflect the poison arrows of government censorship and political correctness throughout the years of apartheid and even now in the present kleptocracy of the Rainbow Nation.

Now in his 72nd year, he doesn’t glance back at the successes and failures that have strengthened his belief in a constant improvement of his work, but at those small signposts that throughout his life subconsciously have pointed him in a right and original direction – growing up in a white South Africa with his Afrikaner father and his German-Jewish mother, confronting diverse influences on him from grandmothers, teachers and the politics of apartheid, and eventually fighting separate developments in life and sex, using humour as a weapon of mass distraction.

Still inspired by the passions of theatre, his love and friendship of Sophia Loren and after turning the apartheid regime's censorship of his work into a public relations exercise, he is now presenting his one-man memoir about making a noise when everyone demanded silence.