Three friends hang out and share a long and unremarkable conversation about getting dressed, headaches, ticks, compression fantasies, surgery, and personal aspirations, among other things. When two of the friends go home for the night, the remaining one watches TV, dances, and takes apart his face in front of a giant mirror.

Originally a play, Sorcerer is a book about the pleasures of being together and being alone. The characters find contentment in each other’s company, conversing in the placid, eerie rhythms of a sitcom in which conflict never arises. Unease is exported to furniture, gadgets, and bodily movements. The result is a counterintuitive kind of realism, lying somewhere between the procedural and the miraculous. There’s levitation.


‘I once compared Sorcerer to a Harold Pinter play. But Pinter never instructed you on how to dismantle your face, amplify your house plumbing, levitate your computer, dance with your sofa, or place a penknife on a bed so that it appears as if no one put it there. Atkins and Zultanski’s play redesigns the contemporary home as a machine for comedy, sadness, and anxiety. Sorcerer is a unique work of theatre and literature, beautiful and unsettling. I can only relate it to the words of the late, great Angela Lansbury: “My family always said I’d travel anywhere to put on a false nose.”’
– Dan Fox