GIVING it eyebrows: Pieter-Dirk Uys transforms into Evita on stage before your very eyes. Photograph courtesy Netwerk 24.

WHEN OLD AGE and its vagaries come under the inestimable loupe of Pieter-Dirk Uys, you may believe you’re in for a laugh-a-second experience with a sharp and bitter edge, and you will not be wrong, but the tears fall amid the laughter, which sometimes sours on your face. When in doubt say ‘Darling’ is a foray into what it means to look back on a career and forward into the possibilities of dotage. It’s self-deprecating as is Uys’s wont, but replete with the one-liners that have defined him for decades, it’s a little tired.

Uys single-handedly defined the notion of holding a mirror up to the shenanigans of the state from the late 1970s, when the vicious madness of apartheid values were at their most self-absorbed and arguably most dangerous peak. He was the one who had the temerity to imitate PW Botha’s ugly grimace from beneath his hat in a way that brought that devil onto the stage, and made you laugh with hilarity because it felt so real, but you knew it wasn’t.

In this new show, Uys offers a taxonomy of South African leaders and insight into the complexity of pulling the mickey out of each of them. He even dusts off his Piet Koornhof mask, the one with the nose and the ears that unmistakably reflects the face of a man who held many different portfolios in the South African apartheid Cabinet, with his characteristically skewed morals and insinuatingly gentle voice. And mostly he looks at this box of monsters with a softened eye. With Thabo Mbeki and his Aids denialism as the obvious exception, of course.

Bringing a tear to your eye as he thinks of Winnie Mandela, Uys scans the newspaper and finds nothing of real moment. He brings a litany of his characters on stage – including his alter-ego, South Africa’s most famous woman, Evita Bezuidenhout, but the entourage is peppered with vignettes of another character, an old man, who is in the process of relocating to a retirement establishment. Accompanied by his dog Smelly, he’s in the process of packing his life into boxes. And what happens with this? The elderly hands need to be pried from objects that hold rusty memories but no real value. And it’s hard to watch.

Also, part of this work is the story behind Uys’s home in Darling, a town in the Western Cape. There are enough Darling metaphors and scenarios to put lipstick on your smiling mouth. There are tales of the children and the poverty of the place — stories of glee and pride. You laugh gently with this figure, who slips chameleonically through eras and identities, but you also sober up and acknowledge that the turning over of decades has rendered Uys an important elder of the theatre community. A unique and irreplaceable one. And this reason, as well as all the others makes it unequivocally a work to cherish.

• When in doubt, say ‘Darling’ is written and performed by Pieter-Dirk Uys until April 22 at the Studio Theatre, Montecasino complex, Fourways. Call 011 511 1818 or visit pietertoerien.co.za
• Read a critical analysis of how this work is seen to touch a nerve in contemporary politics, by Geoff Sifrin.