Curl Up and Dye shifts with the times, but stays forever 1989

Acclaimed artist, director, and actress Sue Pam-Grant brings her seminal work, Curl Up and Dye back to the theatre in Cape Town from 7 to 24 December. The SA Jewish Report speaks to her.

What inspired you to write and perform Curl Up and Dye?

It was 1988, and I had recently moved to Johannesburg after graduating from the University of Cape Town drama school. I realised while struggling to find work that the only way to find it was to make my own. I was visiting a friend who lived in an art deco flat in Joubert Park when I looked out from her balcony, and thought what I was seeing below was a microcosm of society.

The next day, I packed my Walkman into my backpack and walked around the area. I started talking to whoever I could. I gathered a collection of beautiful accounts of people who were all struggling to survive, and they became the characters of Curl Up and Dye.

What did you hope to achieve with Curl Up and Dye at the Black Sun in the late 1980s?

Thirty-three years ago, I simply wanted to get as many people as possible to see what I think is an important work.

Why a hair salon? Why Berea?

Joubert Park is where the play is set, which is just down Nugget Hill (a very definitive hill in the inner city of Johannesburg). It’s just down from Hillbrow and a little bit up from town. At the time, these inner-city areas were still under the Group Areas Act. This was 1988/1989 and these areas (Joubert Park, Hillbrow, Town, and Berea) became known as “grey areas”. Black people were moving into accommodation, but they were being charged an astronomical rent under the most awful conditions. These areas were white, they were high-density with lots of blocks of flats, and this is where I conducted all my interviews. One of the interviews was inside a hair salon, and it became clear to me that it would not only represent a microcosm of what was going on to the outside, but it was also seemingly a safe women’s space and that makes sense because this is a play about five women trying to survive in a turbulent landscape.

At the time, the characters were enlightening and in your face. Are these the same characters?

They were based on real experiences, but crafted into five characters that hold very different views. They are in your face as they are five women surviving and holding onto a shifting landscape. We have the same five characters now, only they have shifted over the past 33 years. In 2013, I revisited the text and realised that the hairdresser, Rolene, needed to be a coloured women who was holding on to her identity as a white woman.

How is Curl Up and Dye different now?

The characters are the same, but they are sharper and more pointed, and they hold the essence of what they represent in a more clear and honest depiction. Time and life experience gave me an opportunity to look back and draw from my own experience, and then use that as insight into the human condition. I guess, growing up has matured my interpretation of these five women.

Describe the process of writing it, and the 2013 version.

In 2013, we changed the hairdresser, Rolene’s, identity, making her coloured but going as a white woman, believing that lie, and representing the “grey area” of the landscape outside the salon. She became a human representation of the socio-political condition of the time. It focused the play on identity politics, and was a dramatic shift.

For this 2022 production, my husband – who I collaborated with on Curl Up and Dye from the start – and I looked at the significance of the play written 33 years ago and its relevance right now. We recognised that post-COVID-19 audiences needed to see a fast, acute, sexy, raw, zappy form of dialogue on stage. We did some strict editing to cut any fluff and excess. I threw out a lot, approaching the play with a contemporary pen, dropping any reflective monologues. The play is shorter now, and is a warfare from beginning to end. By this, I mean the dialogue is so fast, and there is an urgency right now in what we want to do and say, there’s an urgency in our art-making form.

What social commentary are you making?

Curl Up and Dye cuts straight to the bone, especially since matters of race identity and gender-based violence in South Africa remain as urgent and fraught as ever.

Curl Up and Dye has been a boomerang in your life. Describe its impact.

The first rendition of Curl Up and Dye in 1988/1989 was unexpected. It took us from every centre and corner right through South Africa from Soweto to Sasolburg, Welkom to Port Elizabeth, East London, Cape Town you-name-it, Durban, Johannesburg, and then to the Edinburgh Festival where it won A First Fringe. We went all over Germany. Curl Up and Dye was published in the South African Plays Anthology. It’s studied in universities and at schools, and there have been numerous productions of it. Every time I revisit it, I’m opened to a new world and a new way of seeing and being.

Why did you choose to bring it to a small, intimate theatre like the Olympia Bakery Café?

I’m at a point in my life where I’m not interested in traditional theatre spaces, I’m interested in pushing boundaries to ensure the audience has an immersive experience. I opt for the space that will challenge the audience and performers, bringing another dimension to the experience of the work.

What do you hope people will take home from this show?

I hope they will ask themselves lots of questions about the issues that the show brings up. I hope they will engage with their experience, what they laughed at and where they cried. I hope they think about how relevant this play is in 2022. I hope they look at this idea of the human condition and how these deep-seated issues from 1989 are still so present in our daily conditioning.

Will you bring it to Johannesburg?

I don’t know if this is going to come to Joburg. If somebody would like to help sponsor us that would be wonderful. Right now, we’re a self-funded production. The cast we have been working with for the past three months have had no income, and we’re completely dependent on the door.

Is there room for yet another Curl Up and Dye in a few years’ time?

Curl Up and Dye doesn’t feel like it’s something that has an ending. It’s a play about the human condition and our social landscape, and that’s forever changing. I will continue to shift it with the times when it needs to be shifted, but it will never be updated, as in it will always be set in 1989 in a hairdressing salon called Curl Up and Dye in Joubert Park.