Curl up & Dye is on at The Playhouse Theatre in Somerset West next month (June).
The theatre production by Sue Pam-Grant and DJ Grant was first staged in 1989, to huge acclaim in South Africa and Europe. It won a Fringe First at the
Edinburgh Festival in 1990 and it was written up in the New York Times.
The narrative takes place in a hair salon in Joubert Park, Johannesburg.
The salon is on its last legs and mirrors the realities of SA at that time (1989). The salon was in what was termed a “grey area”. The Apartheid Group Areas Act was still in force in 1989, but high density areas such as Joubert Park, Hillbrow and Yeoville were grey areas, where people across the apartheid race classifications were living. This led to many landlords extorting exorbitant rents. It was also a time for an extraordinary diversity across the so-called colour bar – with South Africans living together in congested and crowded blocks of flats.
The play is a vivid archive of our apartheid past.
There is a heart-breaking scene which references the draconian pencil test, administered by the apartheid regime to classify people white: If their hair passed the “pencil test”, they passed as white.
Rolene, the proprietor of the salon, submitted – and passed. One feels sick and saddened watching. The past may be another country and yet it isn’t as the ruptures linger as palimpsests and ghostly emblems which we cannot erase.
The show can be seen at the local theatre venue located in Swalle Street from Wednesday 11 to Saturday 21 June, with evening shows at 19:30 and matinees at 15:00 on two specified days.
For more information, visit www.theplayhouse.org.za/shows/curl-up-dye-2025. Tickets, from R100 to R140, can be booked via Webtickets.
