Gig review by Steve Bennett at Soho Theatre

Promising to cover 65 years of South African history in roughly as many minutes, Peter Dirk-Uys tell us to leave our phones on so we can Google anything we don’t understand.

British people might have to check their data plans; as there’s quite a lot that will sail over a non expat’s head... an issue that reaches insurmountable heights with one of his characters, who cracks almost all her punchlines in Afrikaans. It delights the South African half of the crowd, while seeming positively rude to the rest of us, who are pointedly excluded from the jokes.

This show is out of place in both geography, and in some cases time. Dirk-Uys, now 68, is an absolute veteran of South African satire, forged in a time when mocking the regime, or even displaying the black, green and gold of the ANC, would have been punishable with a prison stay.

What was once dangerously seditious, though, has lost the worst of its sting. Though sometimes laced with acerbic attitude, the tone is more thespian anecdote than rabble-rousing. Dirk-Uys is an undeniable luvvie, opening the show by describing how his love affair with Dame Theatre began when he was a child... an idea which resurfaces near the end with an uplifting tale of how he now uses a community theatre he owns back home for the good of his alienated neighbours.

Whatever his pretentious tendencies, he is, however, an incredible transformative actor, fully inhabiting the characters he presents to become unrecognisable under even the most cursory costume. Precisely what alter-egos are in the show will change every night, since the audience choose a selection from 14 sealed boxes onstage, each containing the props he needs to become a different persona, real or no real.

First up on tonight’s roster was Pik Botha, vigorously denying knowing anything about apartheid, despite being Foreign Minister under the racist regime. He was followed by fans’ favourite, Evita Bezuidenhout, a reformed National Party right-winger now inveigling her way in the rainbow nation. It was she who delivered most of the in-jokes, including the non-English punchlines. What gags we could comprehend were wry rather than hilarious, for example challenging the notion that South Africa’s coloniser Jan van Riebeeck could ever have brought civilisation to the nation... because he was ‘from Holland’.

With both these characters, there’s an underlying message that the white minority who implemented apartheid ‘got away with it’ – with no reprisals, no Nuremberg trials, no Saddam-style witch-hunts – after democracy finally displaced the discredited system. For even behind relatively mild caricatures, Dirk-Uys has an agenda. ‘Just because she doesn’t exist, doesn’t mean she isn’t real,’ he says of Bezuidenhout.

When it comes to his next alter ego, Grace Mugabe, he doesn’t hold back, with a haunting portrayal of a twisted, isolated, avaricious character set to a chillingly rendered version of Old Mugabe Wants That Farm. Funny doesn’t really enter into this, but is a powerful, unforgiving piece, worthy of acclaim.

An older duffer offering a tourist guide to Nelson Mandela’s old haunts is, as you’d expect, a much softer proposition, and rather too weak to be memorable, despite the warmth of the portrayal.

In whatever guise, Dirk-Uys’s challenge is to match the genuine insanity of some of South Africa’s rulers. His postscript is a real Parliamentary answer to a question posed by an smart troublemaking anti-apartheid politician, which reveals the absurdity of the divisive system more than any parody could.

South African expats, or those with a strong understanding of the nation’s chequered history will get a lot from this, beyond the nostalgia for home. But it’s a harder recommendation for a lay British audience, as so much is outside of a common frame of reference.

• An Audience With Peter Dirk-Uys is on at the Soho Theatre until July 27

Review date: 16 Jul 2014
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett