BWW Reviews: Pop Culture Classic CURL UP AND DYE Still a Relevant Discourse on Race and Gender

1989 was a landmark year in South Africa. With change on the horizon, the year was characterised by an uneasy mix of violence and peaceful protest. Countless bombs and limpet mines were exploded; P. W. Botha resigned as state president in August after meeting with Nelson Mandela for the first time in July; and the Purple Rain Protest took place a month later prior to the elections that would officially install F. W. de Klerk as the last State President of South Africa. It was also the year that Sue Pam-Grant's play CURL UP AND DYE first appeared, a piece about five women living in an inner city "grey area" in Johannesburg, the kind of suburb in which people of varying ethnicities lived alongside one another during the last decade of apartheid. CURL UP AND DYE was an instant hit, its personal embodiment of the then-current politics resonating strongly with local audiences.

At the centre of CURL UP AND DYE is Rolene, the manager of the salon from which the play takes its title. Beaten by her husband, Denzil, she takes refuge in her life at the salon where she ekes out a living. Working alongside her is Miriam, a woman who has been doing menial chores at the salon for two decades while dealing with her own difficult home life in Soweto. Regulars at the salon include Mrs du Bois, the neighbourhood gossip who observes everyone around her from her high horse, and Charmaine, a drug-addicted prostitute who spends her days putting herself back together after the previous night's encounters. It takes a new customer, Dudu, a nurse who has worked her way out of an abusive marriage and into a secure position at the hospital where she is employed, to stir things up. When she arrives at Curl Up and Dye, all bets are off and all the suppressed secrets and racism that lurk beneath the other characters' troubled existence rise to the surface.

Christopher Weare's new production of the play, first a bona fide student production for the University of Cape Town's Drama Department in March this year and now the professional debut of five of their 2014 graduates, follows hot on the heels of Pam-Grant's own re-staging of the work last year. Pam Grant's revisionist staging built up the piece into what she termed a 'theatrical documented assemblage'. Weare's approach strips away any kind of excess, challenging the actors to carry the play through their own storytelling abilities. Nonetheless, a remarkable sense of period and urban decay permeate the work, even without, say, the invasive soundscape that was a key feature of Pam-Grant's production. Sometimes less is more, or at least as good.

That said, Weare's production is not a minimalist one; it is a focused one. Barry Christopher's design of this CURL UP AND DYE captures the dual sense of the work in being playful and gritty, with fragmented set pieces assembled by Nic Mayer, Steven Jacobs and Mark Miller in the intimate black box space of the Rosebank and chalk graffiti on the surrounding walls. Leigh Bishop's costumes are designed so that the characters pop against this environment, with strong colour pathways defining each of the characters. The lighting design, by Luke Ellenbogen, augments the mood of the piece, with some nifty touches like the practical light inside the salon's invisible refrigerator.

Weare's focused direction particularly highlights three things about the play. Firstly, the conflict at the heart of the play between the personal and the political ends up front and centre. CURL UP AND DYE is no STEEL MAGNOLIAS, and Pam-Grant exposes the power of racial prejudice to destroy the kind of gender solidarity that Robert Harling says trumps all in his hairdressing drama. Harling would have dramatised the moment in which Rolene and Dudu discover their shared experience as abused women in a way that allowed the characters to find salvation in their commonality. Pam-Grant stands for none of that kind of sentimentality and leaves the two women isolated, with Rolene's deeply embedded racial attitudes keeping them separate, even in this "grey" community.

The second aspect of the play that becomes clear in this production is how weak the structure of the text is in the earlier scenes. CURL UP AND DYE plays out at first as a series of satirical sketches, which reflects the original shaping of the piece in rehearsal by improvisation. There are clear set pieces, like Rolene's discussion on the phone with Denzil, Miriam hawking haircuts as a human billboard and the collective filling in of the crossword puzzle. The play only kicks off and pulls together with Dudu's entrance into the play, when suddenly what the play is about snaps into focus. Prior to that, there is too much exposition, and the conflicts that arise are around activity rather than the central action of the play.

Finally, there is something about the tone of CURL UP AND DYE that glistens in this production. Weare finds something absolutely Chekhovian in the play, possibly as an offshoot of having to negotiate the fragmented first half of the play. Although CURL UP AND DYE is about a third as long as any of Anton Chekhov's major works, there is the same sense of social satire, the same acceleration towards impending doom, the same ineffable blend of tragedy and comedy. The key difference between, say, THE CHERRY ORCHARD and CURL UP AND DYE is also a subverted commonality, in that many people perceive Chekhov to be all doom and gloom and CURL UP AND DYE to be a comedy. The follies and fate of these two playwrights' eccentric and impractical characters fall somewhere in between those extremities.

CURL UP AND DYE is a great choice for a university production. It offers five equally balanced parts, opportunities for each of the actors to craft a rich characterisation of their role and the challenge of creating tight ensemble work. One jump from a student stage to a professional one that this CURL UP AND DYE never negotiates is the youth of its company in a play where at least two of the characters need the weight of age and life experience. As Miriam and Mrs Du Bois, Sive Gubangxa and Maggie Gericke work hard at playing of the relationships between their two characters and those that surround them, but their own age becomes a fissure between actor and character is impossible to negotiate.

Fran Michel's Charmaine has some beautifully realised moments, as does Nicole Fortuin's vulnerable Rolene. Fortuin's performance of Rolene's keeping it together, no matter what, plays no small role in bringing the world of CURL UP AND DYE to life. Shonisani Masutha matches her every step of the way as Dudu, capturing the character's intense pride, her initial empathy for the incorrigible people she encounters in the salon and the complicated shifts in her relationships to each of them.

CURL UP AND DYE emerges as a still relevant piece of theatre some 25 years after its original premiere. Every issue that the play serves up - from racism and the systematic abuse of women to prostitution and the scourge of drugs and alcohol - still haunts this country. In the final analysis, the play may not be one of the classic greats, but it certainly is a pop culture staple of the South African theatre landscape. And for as long as its themes stay current, it will remain one, able to connect with audiences, and audience members to one another.

CURL UP AND DYE runs at the Rosebank Theatre until 23 November 2014. Ticket prices range from R60 - R100 and are available through Webtickets.

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