BYE PERRON, HELLO EVITA 2.0

The lockdown forced Pieter-Dirk Uys to sell his beloved theatre, but now he can take a break and concentrate on giving his alter ego a chic makeover

- JANE VORSTER

HE’S ALWAYS felt capable of handling anything life throws at him. “A terminal optimist” is how PieterDirk Uys has often described himself. “Prepare for the worst and hope for the best”: that was his motto and it served him well . . . until a pandemic rolled in.

In the blink of an eye, everything changed. Evita se Perron, his beloved theatre in the little West Coast town of Darling in the Western Cape stood eerily empty and the 220 performances that had been scheduled for the year were all cancelled.

All this he could accept but what broke his heart was that, as the bills piled up, he had no choice but to retrench the 10 staff members who worked at the Perron.

“It was a terrible, terrible experience,” Pieter (75) says. “I mean, some of them had been with me for years.”

As each day went by he felt more desperate.

But to his relief a solution presented itself in the most unlikely of places. While he was out shopping for groceries towards the end of April, he bumped into two friends who run the local toffee business, Darling Sweet.

“I met them in the store, stocking up on toilet paper, and they said to me, ‘Listen, if you ever think of selling the Perron, talk to us.’ I said, ‘We’re talking.’ ”

Within a week he’d handed over the keys. “It was a big burden off my shoulders,” he says.

Although Pieter is no longer the owner, the Perron lives on and the presence of his much-loved alter ego, Evita Bezuidenhout, can still be felt in the venue he built from scratch on the site of a derelict train station 24 years ago.