Introduction
A prolific playwright, Jean-Pierre Martinez has, in just a few decades, written more than one hundred and twenty plays that form a universe both highly original and remarkably coherent. Together, they constitute an exceptional literary corpus, notable for both its diversity and its scope.
His works are now performed throughout the world, and his texts are studied from secondary school through to university.
Before devoting himself fully to dramatic writing, Jean-Pierre Martinez followed an atypical path that closely links language, meaning, and theatre.
Trained as a linguist, he studied the mechanisms of communication and the structures of discourse before becoming a television screenwriter.
This dual approach, both scientific and narrative, profoundly influences his work: his theatre seeks to decipher the logic of language as much as to explore the misunderstandings that arise from it.
Like Umberto Eco, he considers himself both a linguist and a writer. His writing draws on the solid foundations he acquired in narratology as a researcher at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, while maintaining an analytical perspective on his own theatrical oeuvre.
It is this literary expertise that he wishes to share through this website with all those who make and live theatre today — playwrights, directors, actors, as well as scholars, teachers, and students — by making use of state-of-the-art tools provided by contemporary literary corpus analysis.
Career
Semiotician
Trained in linguistics at the École Pratique des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Jean-Pierre Martinez took part in the 1980s in the work of the Paris School of Semiotics, directed by Algirdas Julien Greimas, successor to Roland Barthes and leading figure of French semiological research.
He also worked with Jean-Marie Floch within the Advertising Semiotics Workshop of the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS).
In parallel, he served for more than twenty years as a consulting semiotician for major research and strategy institutes, including Ipsos.
Screenwriter
Jean-Pierre Martinez has written around one hundred episodes for television series such as Avocats & Associés, Équipe Médicale d’Urgence, Enquêtes Réservées, Sur Le Fil, Extrême Limite, Studio Sud, Le Cap des Pins, La Vie Devant Nous, Indaba, La Dernière Réserve, and others.
He has also taught at the Conservatoire Européen d’Écriture Audiovisuelle in Paris.
Playwright
Since 2003, Jean-Pierre Martinez has devoted himself fully to theatrical writing.
His work is characterised by a style that is both accessible and rigorous, combining irony and tenderness, absurdity and realism, laughter and reflection.
He advocates a popular theatre in the noblest sense of the term: open to all, without ever yielding to superficiality.
Exploring all theatrical genres, from social comedy to metaphysical drama, from social satire to reinvented vaudeville, he examines, in diverse forms, the relationship between the individual and society, the tension between reality and imagination, and the paradoxes of language and communication.
Beneath the humour, a deeper reflection often emerges on identity, memory, relationships, or death, where comedy becomes the vehicle for a sometimes disarming lucidity.
Rejecting institutional constraints, he chose early on to publish his texts freely online in order to make them accessible to all readers, while entrusting performance rights to the SACD.
He also founded his own publishing house, allowing his plays to circulate both in independent bookshops and on major digital platforms.
Author of more than a hundred comedies and collections of sketches, Jean-Pierre Martinez has become one of the most widely performed French-language playwrights in the world.
International Recognition
Translated into more than fifteen languages, the works of Jean-Pierre Martinez are regularly staged across Europe, Latin America, and North Africa, where they attract an ever-growing audience.
From international festivals to amateur theatre companies, his humour crosses borders and cultures, carried by a clear, musical, and profoundly human language.
Often rooted in everyday life, his comedies resonate universally by addressing essential themes with lightness: love, death, memory, loneliness, and the individual’s place in society.
This global reach is also due to the flexibility of his writing, which gives each director the freedom to adapt the texts to their own cultural context.
From Sofia to Buenos Aires, from Istanbul to Lisbon, from Montreal to Mexico City, audiences laugh, reflect, and recognise themselves in the same situations, misunderstandings, and vulnerabilities.
This spirit of openness, rare in today’s theatrical landscape, reflects his deep commitment to a living, shared, and freely accessible culture.
By offering the full reading of his texts to the public while safeguarding their performance rights, Jean-Pierre Martinez promotes an open, humanist, and universal vision of theatre.
Writing Philosophy
For Jean-Pierre Martinez, theatre is above all a laboratory of meaning: a space where reality is deconstructed in order to better reveal itself.
His plays arise from an amused — sometimes ironic, sometimes tender — gaze at human comedy.
Behind the laughter lies a desire to understand what takes place between individuals, in those zones of shadow and light where words, gestures, and silences build or break our relationships.
Humour, for him, is never an end in itself: it becomes an instrument of lucidity, an elegant way of expressing the unsayable without descending into despair.
Far from mere entertainment, his theatre questions appearances, explores the contradictions of the modern world, and interrogates the fragile links between truth and fiction, reality and play, self and other.
This humanist vision permeates his entire oeuvre. By making his texts freely accessible, Jean-Pierre Martinez champions a theatre of sharing, where emotion, thought, and laughter come together to restore dialogue between individuals.
His writing, both humorous and profound, seeks less to impose meaning than to open a space for questioning — that fragile and essential place where theatre meets life.
Resources
Articles Written by Jean-Pierre Martinez (in French)