A prolific playwright, Jean-Pierre Martinez has, over just a few decades, written more than 120 plays that form a theatrical universe both strikingly original and remarkably coherent — an exceptional literary corpus, notable for its diversity as much as for its scope. His works are now performed across the world, and his texts are studied from secondary school through to university.
A playwright but also a scholar in the humanities, Jean-Pierre Martinez took part in the 1980s in the work of the Paris School of Semiotics, under the direction of its founder Julien Algirdas Greimas, himself the successor to Roland Barthes as the leading figure in French semiological research.
Like Umberto Eco, Jean-Pierre Martinez identifies as both a linguist and a writer. In his writing, he draws on the solid foundations he acquired in narratology during his years as a researcher at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. He also casts an analytical eye on his own theatrical work.
It is this literary expertise that he wishes to share through this site with all those who make theatre today — playwrights, directors, actors — as well as researchers, teachers and students, by making use of the most advanced tools that modern technology now offers for the analysis of literary corpora.
This short essay is, for him, a way of closing the circle of my professional, intellectual, and even existential journey: from the study of linguistic theory to literary creation… and ultimately to the self-analysis of his own theatrical work.