When Catalina Theatre owner Themi Venturas introduced Sasol Fever on opening night, he rightly pointed out how so often people think the only real coloured culture is in Cape Town, while Durban bruin ou's have their own vibrant communities. And one of the biggest issues that affected these communities was the migration of most of the men to work at the Sasol Plants in Secunda in the 1970s.
That is the backdrop for Gail Snyman's musical Sasol Fever, which she wrote based on her own experiences as a "Sasol wife". The show introduces us to four young couples living in Wentworth and battling to make ends meet until the Sasol jobs are offered near Joburg. When all the husbands leave to finally make some money, the wives are left behind to spend it and the separation causes significant rifts in the community.
Families were broken, relationships torn apart, but more importantly, lives lost due to this often treacherous work miles away.
While this all sounds very serious, the show is essentially an upbeat musical with a liberal dose of colourful humour. The young cast are impressive with their characterisation and slick dialogue which quickly traverses between playful banter and serious discussion. And the fact that the men and women mostly appear in their separate groups means that there is fertile comic ground for gender politics.
Sasol Fever manages to ride the line between silly and serious and while you'll find you're giggling most of the way through, the poignant ending played out in front of a backdrop of tributes to those who lost their lives, makes you seriously consider the cost of this period.
As Snyman points out in her programme notes: "The Sasol of today is a blue chip, major conglomerate in the global economic market, yet no thought has been given to the men who built it and made it all possible".
10/10
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