Issue 13: Sorcerer
Peter is miming the dismantling of his head. First the eyeballs, each one coming out with a little slurpy plop. Then the teeth, one by one, given a good tug as if with a pair of pliers. He peels back his lips like sticky tape, picking at the tiny unstuck corner and then working it off across his face. The nose goes with a snap, and the hair unzips like a jacket. Peter makes sounds to mimic uncoupling ears and delaminating eyebrows. The process is unsettling, if also quite funny. It’s hard to say whether we are watching a nightly ritual or evidence of a more serious unravelling. He finally removes his imaginary head, placing it carefully on the table in front of him. Watching this, a scene in the second act of Ed Atkins and Steven Zultanski’s new play Sorcerer, I kept thinking something the late, great Angela Lansbury said: “My family always said I’d travel anywhere to put on a false nose.” She made a living out of it but Peter could be any one of us at the end of a long day, trying to figure out what makes ourselves tick.
Sorcerer begins mid-conversation. Ida and Lotte are visiting Peter for drinks at his apartment. The trio—played by Lotte Andersen, Peter Christoffersen and Ida Cæcilie Rasmussen—come across like old friends, easy company, chatting about nothing much. They sit in a black box set, furnished like an average home; there’s an open plan kitchen, a couch and comfy chairs, coffee table. The perimeter of the set is delineated by plumbing pipes. Something seems off, then you realise that the radiators in Peter’s apartment are all hissing loudly, a little like the strange industrial hum you can hear in an early David Lynch film. In fact, everything on stage is close-mic’d; the floors, the tables, cupboards, clothing, giving a disquieting weight to everything. And there’s a bed to one side of the stage that fidgets and vibrates.
We meet the friends as they’re comparing the different ways they approach dressing and undressing. “I always put my head through first, so the shirt hangs from my neck, kind of like a big floppy necklace, and then I find the arms,” says Ida. Lotte says she does the opposite. “I put my arms through and then my head.” Peter: “I do an awkward mixture of both. I put my head and one arm through at the same time…” The exchange goes on a little too long. You wonder where you are being led. We could be watching actors discussing techniques for finding character in ordinary actions. Maybe a comedy of details, like an episode of Seinfeld in which one of life’s irritations is promoted into recognition with the definitive article: The Shirt Move. It could be a disquisition on privacy and oversharing. Or a parody of mindfulness techniques, the practice of being in the moment when you try and take your trousers off but they’re bunching up around your ankles. (In his 2007 book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Haruki Murakami attributes to W. Somerset Maugham the idea that in each shave lies a philosophy. I’ve never found the original quote, which is a little like the feeling of reading articles about mindfulness, the sense that something of the original idea has been lost.)
Conversation idles around peculiar topics. The smell of bad eggs, fantasies about being squashed, how to describe a headache to someone who doesn’t know what they are. At one point Ida suggests the friends play a game. Each person takes it in turn to say a word, with the goal of telling a ghost story. Ida starts off with “Christmas.” Then Peter, “was, ” and Lotte, “coming…” A tale develops about a truck driver, also named Peter, who picks up a hitchhiker on a cold winter’s night. The narrative doesn’t matter as much as the variety of reactions each character has to the way the story is going. Ida is delighted. Peter looks serious, but plays along politely. Lotte appears irritated, then amused, then bored. It’s like watching a silent commentary on the conversation, conveying the kinds of feelings we’ve all had. Frustration because a topic is dull, or because someone is thoughtlessly taking up all the oxygen. Excitement at finding yourself among like minds. Concentration, so that you appear to understand what’s going on.
What’s remarkable about Sorcerer is how subtly it turns these unremarkable exchanges into something uniquely atmospheric. The play seems to hover in a state of irresolution throughout, never fully falling into comedy, realism, or the absurd. The dialogue draws on transcripts of Atkins, Zultanski, and their friends shooting the breeze. The language is straightforward, and it doesn’t give verbs and adjectives strange new world-building jobs as Atkins does in his books. (His novel Old Food, published in 2019, is a bravura work of surrealist prose, pulling off the difficult trick of balancing literary experiment with feeling, humour and empathy.) Often when I see something in the category of The Art of the Everyday I feel as if I am watching observational stand-up but without the reward of laughter, and I yearn for The Art of the Rigorously Edited Highlights. It’s testament to Atkins and Zultanski’s skill as writers that they can take ordinary material and colour it with unease, even sadness. There are moments when the mundane chat seems like the kind of thing you’d drift into with friends on a rainy night stuck indoors. At other points it’s like listening to aliens who are trying to act human. Or puppets in search of ventriloquists to bring them to life. Spies learning tradecraft. People desperate to find any kind of bond.
Lotte mimes taking her own eyes out. Perhaps an idea is now planted in Peter’s mind. But he seems to be coming down with a cold, so Ida and Lotte leave. Peter clears up and potters about. He distractedly watches TV. He cleans his kitchen table. A printer cartridge on the table levitates and stays there, unremarked upon. He takes the empties out, the on-stage sound abruptly goes dead the moment he leaves the door, like a mute button being pressed. It’s as if the apartment does not exist without his consciousness to animate it. It comes back on again when he re-enters. Peter stretches and presses himself against his tables and chairs, levering his body as if doing a kind of dance. (Nønne Mai Svalholm choreographed these scenes.) It reminded me of the ways that children interact with furniture which isn’t scaled to their size. For a child, tables can be caves and bridges to hide under, or the roofs of skyscrapers to climb onto for a better view. The wood and fabric become fantastic landscapes if you press your face close to them.
Eventually the mime begins. The eyes, the teeth… I could imagine this in another period, another medium, as a Soviet-era Eastern European animation—hand-drawn in thick, black-and-white marks, an allegory for whatever it takes to survive the society you’re stuck inside. A cycle of assembling, dissembling, dismantling, re-assembling again. A chance, before escaping into sleep, to check your head, examine your mask for gaps in veracity.
Sorcerer was originally performed at Teater Republique/Revolver in Copenhagen in March 2022. A filmed version is on show at Isabella Bortolozzi’s Eden Eden space in Berlin, until November 5th, and a novelised script will be published next year. It was the recording that I watched. Filmed plays or operas occupy a space, like Sorcerer itself, that is unresolved, neither giving you the live quality of theatre, nor the bells, whistles and illusions of cinema. But the form’s artifice, the minimal sets, small casts, has a beautiful quality of its own. Sorcerer is evocative of the teleplay, series such as Play for Today or Armchair Theatre, for instance. One-off dramas which in the early days of the form were performed live on camera. Here you might catch a Harold Pinter or a Dennis Potter play. Often these one-hour stories would deal with pressing social issues. Sorcerer seems like a drama being workshopped by a group of renegade ontologists and absurdist neuroscientists.
So, who is the sorcerer of the play’s title? In interview, Zultanski has said that the pair don’t want to “give too much away talking about why we chose that title, except to say that we hope it will cast a certain tone over the play. The question of why it’s called Sorcerer or just the knowledge that it is called Sorcerer is interesting in the context of what the play is.” Atkins adds that “I think the relationship to titling things and categorising things is tonal and textual.” ‘Sorcerer’ is a good word, inflected with just the right notes of malevolence and magic. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it derives from the Latin word ‘sors,’ meaning ‘lot’, as in fate, fortune, the cards you’ve been dealt. What motivates you to travel anywhere to put on a false nose.
RECOMMENDATIONS
—Here’s Norma Jean Wright’s 1973 disco classic Sorcerer.
—Here’s another Sorcerer. William Friedkin’s 1977 remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1953 thriller Wages of Fear, about a group of hard-bitten good-for-nothings employed by an unscrupulous oil company (is there any other kind?) to transport two truckloads of high explosives across hazardous mountain roads. Great Tangerine Dream soundtrack.
—Both Sorcerer and The Wages of Fear star Yves Montand, who also appears in Costa-Gavras’s classic anti-fascist thrillers Z (1969) and State of Siege (1972). These were both distributed by Cinema 5, an American film distribution and theatre chain which made its name by taking on art-house and international films that other US companies wouldn’t touch, and turning those films into box-office successes. They worked with directors including Satyajit Ray, Lina Wertmüller, The Maysles’ Brothers, Barbara Kopple, Ingmar Bergman, Nicolas Roeg, Agnes Varda, Margarethe von Trotta, and Francois Truffaut. One of their hits was George Butler and Robert Fiore’s docudrama Pumping Iron which made the then unknown Arnold Schwarzenegger into a star. Cinema 5 was run by the outrageous and impossible Donald S. Rugoff, an old-fashioned showman of the PT Barnum kind. His wild story is told in Ira Deutchman’s Searching for Mr Rugoff. (Art world professionals watching the film may recognise his son, the curator and Hayward Gallery director Ralph Rugoff.)
—MIT has just published a book by my friend, the artist and writer Abraham Adams, titled Ambulance Chasers. It’s a strange, disquieting photography book, juxtaposing images of personal injury lawyers on US roadside billboards with the landscapes they look out onto. It conjures an America that is desolate, depressed, hanging by a thread. The book features a long and deep conversation between Adams and critic David Joselit, which ranges across topics such as typology, space, reproduction, the ‘good enough’ image and vertigo. Do not read while driving.