As Fire Burns

It is the end of the 1970s. Sonja Holm is in her forties, working as a clerk in a state controlled enterprise. The most important people in her life are her teenage daughter and the daughter’s boyfriend, as well as Sonja’s own mother and father, her two friends and the husband of one of those friends. A new love affair also enters the picture. Together with her two friends, Sonja opens a Summer Café. The three women achieve a very satisfactory working relationship and have fun together, but they also come to understand one another’s personal problems. Gradually, they realise that many of the failures in their lives have been the results of not their own shortcomings but of the pattern that they have been caught up in. A pattern that causes problems for both men and women, and a pattern that could be changed. The women in the play have taken the first step: they have started to question that pattern. Ultimately, it is Sonja’s quest for identity and self-acceptance that guides this introspective story from a raw and cold February morning through warm and pleasant summer days and finally into an early August morning ending. (Tinfo/Sunklo)