Symbioses exist in nature that are as perfect as they are terrifying: the cordyceps fungus that commandeers the body of an ant, the emerald wasp that zombifies a cockroach to make it a cradle for its own offspring. And then there is the relationship between "Sir" and Norman in Peter Yates's The Dresser, a theatrical folie à deux so all-consuming and pathological as to make any biological parasitism pale in comparison. The film, adapted from the superb play by Ronald Harwood (who was, in fact, the dresser for the legendary actor-manager Donald Wolfit), is not simply a film about the theatre. It is the theatre itself which, like a senescent Cronus, devours its own children, leaving behind only the echo of applause and the stale scent of greasepaint and dust.

We are in the midst of the Second World War. While outside, the sirens of the Luftwaffe tear through the English night and bombs redraw the geography of the cities, inside a dilapidated provincial theatre, another war, more intimate and perhaps more devastating, is reaching its climax. Sir (a monumental Albert Finney, a King Lear even before he puts on the makeup for King Lear) is the titan at the head of a ramshackle touring Shakespearean company. He is a dinosaur of the actor's art, a black hole of ego and need, an Ozymandias whose memory is already sand in the wind. Stricken by a mental and physical collapse in the middle of a street, he is brought back to his dressing room, a decrepit sanctuary where his one true officiating priest is Norman (Tom Courtenay, in one of the most heart-wrenching and meticulously constructed performances in the history of cinema).

Norman is the "dresser". But the definition is reductive, almost insulting. Norman is the keeper of the flame, the architect of his master's fragile sanity, his mirror, his memory, his jailer, and his one true love. Their relationship is a desperate ballet with the precision of a ritual and the chaos of an exorcism. Every one of Norman's gestures—preparing the tea, applying the makeup, prompting the forgotten lines—is a profane liturgy to summon the god of the stage from the trembling shell of a frightened old man. In this, the film elevates itself to an almost metaphysical analysis of the relationship between creator and facilitator, between the artist and the one who makes his art possible. Norman is not Sir's Salieri; there is no envy, but a devotion that borders on self-annihilation. He is more akin to the Max von Mayerling of Sunset Boulevard, who projects his Norma Desmond's films to keep alive an illusion that has become his very reason for living. But while Max lives in Norma's glorious past, Norman fights to build a present for his Sir, one night at a time.

Yates, with direction as invisible as it is masterful, transforms the claustrophobic space of the backstage into a Kammerspiel of the soul. The outside world, with its bombs and its capital-H History, becomes the perfect objective correlative for Sir's inner tempest. The evening's scheduled performance of King Lear is no longer a fiction, but a live chronicle of a disintegration. The wail of the sirens merges with the wind on the heath; the precarity of an England under siege reflects the fragility of a mind that is giving way. In this sense, The Dresser is the dark, theatrical twin of a film like Szabó's Mephisto. If Brandauer's Hendrik Höfgen made a pact with the Nazi devil to keep acting, Sir makes his pact solely with his own monstrous vanity and with Norman's servitude, ignoring the collapsing world so that he can howl his suffering on the stage one more time. Art here is not an escape from reality, but an act of defiance so pure and narcissistic as to become almost insane.

The performances of Finney and Courtenay are a duel of rare intensity, a clash between two different conceptions of the void. Finney is an expansive chasm: he shouts, weeps, grandstands, despairs, phagocytizing every ounce of energy and attention in the room. He is a black hole that warps the space-time around him. Courtenay, by contrast, is an implosive void. His performance is a masterpiece of subtraction, built entirely on minimal gestures, affected vocal inflections that hide an abyssal pain, and a cutting irony that is his only armour. He is the Sancho Panza to a tragic Don Quixote, the Fool to a Lear who can no longer distinguish the stage from life. There is an entire unlived life behind Norman's eyes, a universe of repressed desires and unrequited love that manifests itself only in the way he adjusts a collar or offers a glass of brandy.

The film is imbued with a meta-textual aura that makes it an almost inexhaustible object of study. The fact that Harwood was writing from his direct experience with Wolfit adds a first layer of vertigo. But it is the choice of King Lear as the play-within-the-play that seals its status as a masterpiece. Sir does not play Lear, he is Lear, abandoned by his "daughters" (the company's actresses, his wife), with only his Fool, Norman, to protect him from a storm that is as much meteorological as it is existential. And Norman's tragedy, revealed in the finale, is perhaps even more Shakespearean than Sir's. After the death of his master and god, Norman discovers he is not even mentioned in the acknowledgements of his autobiography. It is the drama of the subordinate, the invisible man, of one whose entire existence has been a function of another. It is the drama of Patroclus without Achilles, of Watson without Holmes, of the instrument put back in its case after the symphony has ended. His final despair is not over an act of ingratitude, but over an ontological erasure. If his life was to serve Sir, and Sir does not acknowledge him, then his life never existed.

One could see in Sir and Norman a theatrical, Beckettian version of Vladimir and Estragon, two beings trapped in a cycle of waiting and dependence, where "Godot" is the audience's applause, the only thing that can momentarily fill their void. But unlike Beckett's characters, here there is a cruel hierarchy, a power dynamic that makes their co-dependency all the more painful. Norman chose his prison, furnished it with care, and polished its bars every day, trading his own identity for proximity to a form of greatness, however decadent and toxic.

The Dresser is an elegy for a world that is no more: that of the touring companies, of the monstres sacrés of acting, of a theatre that was still a collective ritual and not mere entertainment. But its reach is universal. It speaks to anyone who has ever sacrificed a part of themselves on the altar of another's talent, to anyone who has ever loved an idea, an art, or a person so much that they became its shadow. It is a film that smells of dust, sweat, and desperation, a poignant testament to the parasitic nature of creation and to the deafening silence that follows the final curtain call. And in Norman's final cry, a strangled lament in an empty dressing room, resonates the tragedy of all the dressers of history, the invisible cogs without whom the grand, magnificent, cruel machine of show business would grind to an instant halt.