Friday the 13th

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John and Christine, a couple in their thirties struggling financially, are expecting friends for dinner. Natalie arrives alone: her husband Patrick has just been reported dead in a plane crash. As they attempt to comfort her, the national lottery results come in — and John realises he holds the winning ticket. A collision of emotions erupts: fake compassion meets suppressed euphoria. The evening spirals into a chain of misunderstandings, lies, and reversals… until Patrick suddenly walks in, very much alive.

A darkly funny play about luck, guilt, and coincidence, Friday the 13th balances laughter and discomfort with the precision of black vaudeville, exposing the comic cruelty of fate.

Date of writing2009

Number of characters8 characters

Cast3 or 4 actors, in any gender combination: 3F, 1M/2F, 2M/1F, 3M or 4F, 1M/3F, 2M/2F, 3M/1F, 4M

Stage setThe living room of a modest middle-class North London flat in the middle of a move: a slightly shabby Christmas tree, boxes, a modern painting leaning against the wall. Everything breathes a veneer of comfort masking financial precarity. Radio, television and the telephone — constantly present — bring the outside world (the crash, the lottery, the news) directly into the intimacy of the home.

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Genre Overview

Friday the 13th belongs to the intimate realist comedy, rooted in the banality of a domestic setting where the extraordinary erupts through pure chance. Far from pure farce, the play thrives on contrasts: everyday life versus catastrophe, empathy versus self-interest. Martinez blends the tight mechanics of vaudeville (doors, lies, misunderstandings) with the moral bite of tragicomedy: humour emerges from the tension between feigned compassion and genuine greed.

The writing — sharp, rhythmic, finely tuned — exposes the contradictions of the modern couple, caught between lucid cynicism and awkward tenderness, while revealing the cruel comic logic of fate.

Thematic Panorama

Beneath the laughter, Friday the 13th explores human fragility under the dual tyranny of chance and desire.

Two forces collide throughout the play: moral compassion and personal interest. John and Christine, representatives of a precarious lower-middle class, oscillate between empathy and jealousy, shame and appetite. The external catastrophe (the crash) reveals an internal one: lies, selfishness, greed.

The lottery results act as a grotesque mirror of destiny: even luck becomes tragic when it arrives at the worst moment. Martinez depicts an ordinary humanity full of contradictions, where money, death, and morality become inseparable. The irony of fate transforms the banal into the absurd, turning destiny itself into a cruel comic engine.

Themes: luck, chance and fate • love, couple and fidelity • bourgeois hypocrisy and social morality • money, success and precarity • solidarity, egoism and guilt • illusion of material happiness • the comedy of misfortune and bad faith • irony of fate and everyday fatalism.

Dramaturgical Context

Within Martinez’s theatrical universe, Friday the 13th encapsulates his talent for satirical realism: a theatre of the everyday where conversation becomes a tool for irony and revelation. The closed, familiar setting — a flat, a table, a television — frames a small-scale moral drama: ordinary people confronted with the exceptional.

The writing relies on the rhythm of dialogue and the collision of tones: trivial and tragic, compassionate and petty, sincere and deceitful.

Friday the 13th itself becomes a symbolic catalyst: both a harbinger of misfortune and a promise of fortune. The play intertwines vaudeville techniques (returns, misunderstandings, comic timing) with elements of social drama, and borrows from cinematic language (verbal shot/reverse shot, television-triggered twists). It questions the society of consumption and spectacle, where emotions pass through screens.

For Martinez, laughter becomes a form of lucidity: it reveals the comedy of human misfortune and the relativity of our modern tragedies.

Character Types / Functions : A couple in crisis (John & Christine) • a grieving friend / sacrificial figure (Natalie) • the returning intruder / destabilising element (Patrick).

Set:  Contemporary domestic interior, closed space of a social huis clos; symbolic objects — suitcase, painting, television, Christmas tree — embody the disillusionment of everyday life.

Temporality: Immediate present, real-time progression of an ordinary evening transformed by the tragicomic coincidence of Friday the 13th.

Motifs : Suitcase, lottery ticket, crash, champagne, Christmas tree, telephone, lies, irony of fate.

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Copyright

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