Pieter-Dirk Uys Biography

South African playwright and satirist, born in Cape Town, educated at the University of Cape Town and the London Film School. He has written, directed, and acted in many plays, mainly for the Space Theatre (Cape Town) and the touring Syrkel Theatre Company, and is also well known as a satirical impersonator of South African politicians. His plays are darkly satirical comedies about how apartheid corrupts the self-regarding white middle classes. What he has said about one of his plays, God's Forgotten (1975), can be applied to most of them: ‘It is a black comedy or a white tragedy—depending on whose side you're on.’ Two other plays, Paradise Is Closing Down (1977; rewritten in 1987) and Panorama (1987), have been collected in Paradise Is Closing Down and Other Plays (1989). Other plays include Scorched Earth (1989) and Just Like Home (1989); No-one's Died Laughing (1986) is an autobiographical look at how he developed his political satire.