Review: Pudotuspeli

Lilla Teatern’s hilarious job search comedy

IN THE PLAYOFFS, EVERYONE IS YOUR ENEMY

What happens when four career guns looking for the same job are locked in a room to perform absurd tasks? This absurd recruitment interview is followed in Lilla Teatern’s insanely funny job search comedy Playoffs. The play, which premiered in Finnish on 20 April, is also a poignantly topical satire on the modern labour market. Whoever leaves the room first loses his or her seat.

The Playoff (Grönholms metod), written by Catalan author Jordi Galceranin, premiered in Barcelona in 2003 and has since been seen by more than a million people around the world. Galceranin also visited Finland to watch the Finnish premiere of the Playoffs.

The events of the play, translated into Finnish by Anu Partanen and directed by Pentti Kotkaniemi, take place in a skyscraper in Barcelona, where the four of the play’s four arrive to participate in a recruitment interview for the Swedish furniture giant Dekia. Ferran Augé (Pekka Strang), who swears by hard values, is confident of his victory and despises the emotional thinking of the only woman in the group, Mercé Degás (Jonna Järnefelt). Slightly shabby shopkeeper Enric Font (Carl-Kristian Rundman) believes that a new job will save his life. Carles Buenos (Sampo Sarkola), on the other hand, is not afraid to ask intrusive questions. In a competitive situation, each of them reacts in their own way. Job seekers have to put their entire private lives in the hands of other applicants and a faceless employer in a test that gets weirder with each round. The setting drives the candidates to calculate, form alliances and plot against each other.

The structure of the play is ingenious, and the plot surprises the audience again and again. The audience laughs, roars audibly, but there is also something painfully familiar about the steps on stage. Even in real life, job seekers have to submit to various psychological tests, and intensifying competition builds a situation where employee to employee is a wolf. The applicant must sell not only their skills but, above all, their personality to the employer. The play asks whether, for example, is divorce the responsibility of the employer? The one who makes it to the playoffs is the one who is willing to sacrifice their entire private life on the altar of productivity and plot others out of the game.