Foreign Aids

Pieter-Dirk Uys's latest satirical sideswipe at the absurdities of his South African homeland (and some of the absurdities of ours, such as the fact that the ex-Railtrack boss here made more from the railways than Ronnie Biggs did, he quips) moves from the political to the sexual arena.

Living, as he does, in a country where HIV is now threatening to succeed where his previous target, apartheid, ultimately failed to marginalise and eradicate the black population, his one-man mission to spread the word about the spreading of the disease is as urgent as it is personal.

It's a job that his government is certainly failing to do. So Uys - through the character of Evita Bezuidenhout (a South African Dame Edna and the self-proclaimed most famous white woman in the country) - has personally gone into some 160 schools, free of charge, to talk about condoms and safe sex.

Evita makes a customary appearance in the one-man, many-character work he has brought to the Tricycle, as does her sister, Bambi Kellerman, who in fact has AIDS, and other non-fiction characters like the South African president, Dr Thabo Mbeki, who believes that it is a fiction that HIV causes the disease.

More polemical than comic, given the understandably horrible circumstances, Uys displays a terrific humanity and a scalpel-like ability to cut to the quick with his incisive observations. The political landscape in South Africa is superbly conjured by the point that, if you yield to the left, nothing is right; and if you yield to the right, nothing is left.

But if you yield to visiting the Tricycle, you'll find that Uys is ace.

Mark Shenton