Review: Försäljarna

WHEN BUSINESS IS EVERYTHING


David Mamet was awarded the Pulitzer Prize almost 25 years ago for his play Glengarry Glen Ross – an unvarnished study and black comedy about the darkest sides of vulgar capitalism. The fact that Lilla Teatern has taken up the play with the Swedish title The Salesmen as the main attraction in the autumn repertoire shows partly that the theatre management has chosen a play that is still relevant, and partly that they continue with quality entertainment, where the script with its biting lines and the strong acting characters form a personal drama that captivates, amuses and horrifys.
Anyone who saw the strong, raw film version with Al Pacino and Jack Lemmon has a comparison material that is good enough. Still, The Salesmen hardly ends up in the shadow of the film, precisely because the story in this personal drama about sales in absurdum has a dynamic that perhaps better than in any of Mamet’s other plays functions as a perpeetum moblie with the strong acting as a driving force.
We witness a story about four sellers of worthless land who work with a knife to the throat. For them, there are no half-measures or good will, it’s a matter of winning or disappearing.


Three plus one

The vendors are dramaturgically scheduled in the first act’s three scenes in a Chinese restaurant, and the second act’s chaotic, thriller-like continuation in a run-down office landscape – recognition and dissolution in a nutshell.
In act one, we are first confronted with the rusty former sales machine (Asko Sarkola) that has lagged behind in sales, we hear him begging and asking for new hot names to sell for by the ice-cold calculating work administrator (Sampo Sarkola). In the next scene, the hot-tempered, successful young rooster (Sixten Lundberg) talks to his much older, seasoned and already self-critical colleague (Tom
Wentzel) about unbearable work stress and about old, better times. Finally, we have the team’s star salesman (Carl-Kristian Rundman) who, with ingenuity and cunning, gets an unsuspecting customer (Joachim Wigelius) to enter into a land purchase without him even knowing it.


Final battle

In the second act, the sales office has been the victim of a nighttime burglary, valuable lists of names and sales contracts have disappeared. Someone has benefited from the crime, but the question is who and why? The police (Marc Svahnström) are on site and interrogate the vendors one by one, all while suspicions jump like flares from one to the other.
Old grudges come to the surface, harsh words, bad words and funny words are exchanged at a staccato pace between people who, for the sake of their livelihood, have been polished and worn against each other and are again forced to fight a fight of all against all, a fight where success is usually a chimera and triumph a defeat.
If The Salesmen is clearly a theatrical gem thanks to its devilishly skilful lines, it gets its most beautiful luster from the driven actor work. Here, both the interaction between the actors and the focus on the character of the individual actor form an unshakable foundation for a story about human evil and greed. But above all, it is the codes and regulations of the business world, or rather the lack of them, that are highlighted with a rarely experienced sarcasm but also a liberating and disarming sense of humour.