Review: Försäljarna

WELL PLAYED ABOUT UNSCRUPULOUS BROKERS

In the wake of the American financial crisis, David Mamet’s play Glengarry Glen Ross has washed up at Lillan under the Swedish title The Salesmen. It is an event that looks like a thought. The play about a group of real estate agents who desperately try to cheat customers out of bad properties in order to avoid becoming unemployed themselves was actually written a quarter of a century ago. But it has been played often since then, is perhaps Mamet’s very best, and can be seen as a small local slice of a big sick economy then as now.

The company’s four salespeople are, with a few exceptions, in their fifties. The most experienced but also most noticeable of the profession is Shelly Levine, in the days of her power called the Machine Levine. We know the variety from several American dramas on stage and film, most clearly and best from Arthur Miller’s The Death of a Merchant. But while this focuses on the protagonist Willy Loman and wants to join the pattern of the great tragedy, Levine is a cog in a team. And with his superb way of letting the team’s cogs intervene, Mamet creates a not a little complicated plot play. This increases the entertainment value, but probably reduces the audience’s ability to feel empathy to a corresponding extent.

The pace is high. Lightning fast, the game lights go up and the first dialogue kicks off. It is Asko Sarkola in the role of Levine and Sampo Sarkola as the day-to-day manager of the office, Williamson, a young guy who has all the strings in his hand by portioning out the clients for the brokers as he sees fit. They sit in a booth at a simple Chinese restaurant, in the next scene two new people enter another booth and finally two more in scene three. One person per couple is very talkative and active, the other listening. This is the first act, and as a dramaturgy it is a very nice triptych.

The second act takes place at the broker’s office the next day, a dreary room that has been burglarized during the night. A detective in shirt sleeves and with a pistol holster (Marc Svahnström) comes out of a side room at irregular intervals and orders one employee at a time for questioning. The primary function of that role is to insert rhythmic accents into the game, another sign of Mamet’s mastery as a constructor.

In Pentti Kotkaniemi’s discreet direction, it is the actors who stand out above all, and it is gratifying to see such consistently high quality in a Swedish-language ensemble at Lillan. I would like to give an extra plus to Sixten Lundberg, whose scenic energy seems to be able to move mountains. And another for Tom Wentzel’s fine portrayal of the real estate agent Aaronow with a different temperament than that of his competitors-colleagues, so that his line of lines gets its own melody in the whole – slower, more hesitant, more thoughtful. Lundberg’s and Wentzel’s scene in the first act is, in my opinion, the absolute best moment of the performance.

Sometimes with victorious arm swings, sometimes with helplessly flapping hands, Asko Sarkola wraps his character Levine, a big talker like Lundberg’s Moss and Carl-Kristian Rundman’s Rosa. The latter is slightly younger in age than his colleagues and captures customers with an even fluid imagination, which Rundman manages well. Joachim Wegeliusz makes a deceived customer tightly and with small means. And Sampo Sarkola , in his relatively devoid of lines, is able to build a telling silence around his character, which suggests the danger.