Viirus GUEST: Äckel

Viirus GUEST: Äckel
Theatre Mestola

Are you disgusted when adults act like children?
Are you disgusted when a grown man urinates outside your gate?
Does people’s fake but convenient inauthenticity disgust you?
Are you disgusted by the masculine and feminine norms we inherit?
What makes you existentially disgusted?

A bachelor student of political science moves to an urban metropolis.

But soon suffers from an unfathomable indifference and a complete melancholy about the things around him and their insignificance. He is disgusted by his neighbors’ prying eyes and the exposed windows of the neighboring house.

He becomes more and more alienated and isolated in his own dream apartment until he falls madly in love with a burnout actor from the neighboring theater. But in the end she also only becomes a projection surface for his disgust. How to find a vaccine against this self-destructive disgust and nausea?

Fabian Silén’s Äckel (Nausea) is loosely based on Jean-Paul Sartre’s classic La Nausée (Nausea) from 1938. It’s an existential redeeming deep dive into a posthuman society where everything is present and felt, but nothing is understandable. The show is an uncensored steam of consciousness of man’s ability to solve the futility with some self- irony and faith in the beauty around us. Silén has established himself as one of the most productive and personable Swedish-Finnish playwrights. This is his fifth play. In Äckel, Silén drives the inner monologue to higher mountains.