Analysis of the play Nicotine

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1 – Analysis of the play Nicotine

The text does not seek to develop a traditional plot that unfolds across the entire play. Instead, it advances in small strokes, gradually composing a composite tableau in which a multitude of more or less interchangeable characters intersect. As in a cubist painting, the same reality can be viewed successively from different angles. Each micro-exchange contributes to a web of conversations that may appear trivial yet collectively provide a fragmented testimony about the modern workplace. The humour arises from this affect-free gaze, which treats professional life as an observable phenomenon — a system in which individuals, like ants, perform precise roles without ever fully realising it.

The enunciation reinforces this device. The dialogues are short, often elliptical, resembling observational notes. The large number of roles (with actors often playing multiple parts) strengthens the impression of a world populated by “types” rather than psychologically developed characters. This produces a deliberate depersonalisation, revealing how organisations absorb and normalise individuals. The play adopts the tone of a report: without pathos, without judgement, and almost without narrative construction. It simply shows what human relationships have become in a standardized corporate environment.

The connotative effect grants this comedy an objective, rather than subjective, critical dimension. Through successive sketches depicting employees as puppets subjected to empty rituals and absurd exchanges, the play highlights the loss of meaning produced by total dependence on corporate norms. Laughter emerges from the gap between the apparent lightness of these insignificant interactions and what they ultimately reveal: a society in which the individual dissolves into the collective until becoming a mere cog.

Nicotine thus stands as a quintessential example of objectivist social comedy: a theatre that scrutinises everyday gestures to illuminate the structures that shape them. A theatre of minimalism, where laughter seeps into the tiny malfunctions of an over-regulated system. A theatre that shows how modern society reduces people to functions — and yet how a fragile humanity still flickers beneath these robotised behaviours.

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2 – Dramaturgical Analysis

Structure and Aesthetics

Nicotine belongs to Martinez’s characteristic choral dramaturgy, which favours writing in fragments to capture micro-moments of life. The unity of place — the smoking terrace — operates as a dramaturgical device, concentrating multiple tensions within a liminal space outside strict hierarchical constraints. The play adopts an aesthetic of satirical realism, continually slipping toward the grotesque, the absurd or a kind of gentle dystopia. The brevity of the sequences creates a rapid, almost cinematic rhythm, heightening the impression of a continuous flow in which voices intersect without ever forming a true dialogue. Humour becomes a critical tool, exposing the contradictions of a system that oscillates between performative benevolence and structural violence.

Characterisation

The characters form a deliberately broad sociological sample: anxious executives, disembodied HR managers, suspicious security officers, clear-eyed interns, communications consultants, technicians, salespeople and precarious workers. None is developed as a central protagonist; the play relies instead on a polyphony of silhouettes who appear, disappear and occasionally return. This does not diminish their dramaturgical weight: each carries a fragment of social truth, a symptom of organisational malaise. Their characterisation depends less on individual psychology than on the function they embody — hierarchy, threat, managerial discourse, fear of demotion, illusions of success. The language, saturated with corporate clichés, reveals their difficulty in existing outside the roles imposed on them. Humanity surfaces in the cracks: confidences, awkwardness, lapses, tiny fears.

Narrative Dynamics

The play is built as a mosaic, composed of independent dramatic units connected by a shared space and recurring motifs. This fragmented structure generates a collective movement that is neither linear nor cumulative, but spiral: scenes echo, distort and complement one another. The absence of a single protagonist reinforces the sense of a collective narrative, while micro-intrigues (workplace accidents, layoffs, suspicions, coaching sessions, hierarchical tensions, minor catastrophes) succeed one another at a brisk pace. The motion is circular: characters enter and exit as they would in a transit space, echoing the mechanics of farce but freed from its plot constraints. This fragmentation reflects the fractured nature of contemporary professional experience — instability, segmented time and constant interruption. The terrace becomes the place where one briefly steps out of the flow, without ever truly escaping it.

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Scope and Significance

Nicotine offers a finely tuned social critique without ever tipping into polemic. The play illuminates transformations in the modern workplace: precarisation, emotional management, surveillance, commodification of human relations, the rise of psychosocial risks. The smoking terrace appears as a paradoxical space: clandestine yet tolerated, outdoors yet controlled, communal yet deeply solitary. By choosing humour as its operative mode, Jean-Pierre Martinez proposes a reflection that is both accessible and profound on human fragility within organisational environments. The work questions what companies do to individuals — and what individuals consent to become in order to survive within them. It reveals a form of contemporary tragedy, dissolved in humour and everyday banality, yet signalling broader social tensions.

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