Review: Hissvägraren

SUBTLE ELEVATOR DRAMA PAINTS AN ENTIRE PANORAMA OF LIFE

With a rich, meaning-filled text and direction by Bengt Ahlfors and with Lasse Pöysti’s charismatic stage charisma, the monologue The Elevator Refuser at Lilla Teatern becomes an experience.

The monologue performance, which lasts just over an hour and a half, retains its intensity and fascination from beginning to end. Gradually, the text, direction and Lasse Pöysti’s strong performance build up an atmospheric, moving, melancholy and softly comic portrait of a lonely old man who looks back on his life and tries to overcome his isolation.

The theme is loneliness, which is described through different situations, relationships, philosophical reflections and other existential solutions. Bengt Ahlfors manages to include both warm sensitivity, wisdom of life, a lot of humour and ingenious, tragicomic and absurd details in this play about contact difficulties, disappointments and small joys.

He has also superbly transferred these textual elements to his direction of the play.

The elevator refuser is the boy, the man, the elderly who both refuses and does not refuse to ride the elevator. The Kone elevator in the house where the elevator refuser has lived since childhood becomes Enoch in its mirrored form. And it is with Enoch that the elevator refuser communicates in different ways during his childhood and later life.

The elevator refuser lives on Caloniuksenkatu on the seventh floor and gradually creates a multifaceted relationship with Enoch, which turns out to be one of the nobility of elevators. Sometimes it’s a matter of keeping fit and walking all the way up to the seventh floor, sometimes there are small compromises because the shopping bag is so heavy.

In between, the elevator refuser remembers how he was bullied as a child and called hurri by the evil Matti, who later became an artist, drove himself to death and had a memorial plaque put up on the stairs. The elevator refuser also has a strong relationship with Grace Kelly . Both were born on the same day and the elevator refuser follows Kelly’s film career and princess life as an adult, mourning her death and remembering the day of her death every year.

The dog Kafka, who lived to be eleven years old, also had an important place in the life of the elevator refused. And the elevator refused even promised not to get a new dog.

It also becomes tragicomic when the elevator refuser tells how he visits funerals and weddings to experience closeness to people and community. In the end, the elevator refuser even wanders into a sex club.

With his theatrical presence, Lasse Pöysti makes the text vibrate with life and builds a panorama of place and time that encompasses Helsinki, the world, events in the past and the present.

From time to time, the fiction breaks down and Pöysti emerges as the actor who turns to the audience with reflections on the length of pauses, problems with memorizing the text and the credibility of the play. This move somehow further strengthens the relationship between the audience and the character and creates a clever dimension between reality and illusion, the real world and the world of the senses.

The set design is minimalistic, a table, a chair, a rose in a vase in memory of Grace Kelly. The physical stage space is also stripped down, but Lasse Pöysti also fills it with his presence.