At Your Service

A manic bellhop ricochets through a palatial hotel’s corridors, his limbs cartoonish putty in a ballet of pandemonium; each slammed door ejaculates society’s castes—matrons with feathered helmets, bootleggers masquerading as dentists, a child millionaire wielding a lollipop like a scepter—into a single pressure-cooker corridor where chaos is currency and etiquette is the first casualty. The concierge, a man whose moustache behaves like an unfaithful caterpillar, dispenses room keys as if doling out existential lottery tickets, while the elevator becomes a vertical stage where guests rehearse their own diminuive tragedies between floors. Our bellhop, half Charlie Chaplin’s DNA, half hotel cog, juggles steamer trunks, love letters, and a runaway goat with the same frazzled grace, until a missing diamond brooch detonates a domino-topple of mistaken identities, exposing that every polished shoe in the lobby hides a blister of desperation. By the time the fire brigade arrives for a conflagration that never quite ignites, the building itself has metamorphosed into a carnival mirror: the penthouse sees the basement, the honeymooners see the con-artists, and the audience sees the absurd circuitry of class—laughing not because the machinery is broken, but because it is oiled with our own fingerprints.