Curl Up and Dye

Curl up & Dye – by Sue Pam-Grant & 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. It was written up in the New York Times. The narrative takes place in 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, 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 its isn’t as the ruptures linger as palimpsests and ghostly emblems which we cannot erase