Crash Zone

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On a supposed crash site, three people – Fred, Dom and Yan – meet to pay tribute to their brother, who disappeared in a plane crash. But the body was never found, and doubt soon creeps in: was he really their brother? Did they ever even exist at all?

Balancing laughter and vertigo, Crash Zone turns a funeral tribute into a metaphysical quest, where the boundary between reality and illusion gradually blurs. Lost in an undefined landscape – cliff edge, brink of the abyss, or edge of the stage – the characters replay their own disappearance.

Through sharp dialogue, trivial objects (a Paris-Brest pastry, a pen, a flyer) and humour tinged with the absurd, Jean-Pierre Martinez explores the fragility of identity and the human need to construct meaning in the face of the void. The final rainbow, a fragile apparition before nightfall, closes the play as a sign of hope as fleeting as life itself.

Date of writing2017

Number of characters3

CastThree characters of unspecified gender (in this version: one man and two women)

SetOn the edge of a cliff. Timeless, minimalist atmosphere: rain, rainbow, final darkness.

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Genre Overview

Crash Zone stands at the crossroads between dark comedy and metaphysical fable. Jean-Pierre Martinez blends absurd humour, existential tension and the poetry of the trivial. Through a stripped-back stage device, the play explores the shifting line between comic and tragic, turning an ordinary situation into a meditation on meaning and disappearance.

Thematic Panorama

The play tackles universal themes: grief, the search for identity, memory, doubt and belief. The characters try to give meaning to absence, to rebuild a story in a world where points of reference are fading. Comedy arises from the contrast between their attempts to rationalise the inexplicable and the emptiness of their certainties. Crash Zone also evokes the contemporary difficulty of facing loss in a society saturated with images and narratives.

  • Grief and memory – an impossible tribute where loss becomes abstraction.

  • Identity and filiation – family ties dissolve into ontological uncertainty.

  • Belief and doubt – the characters waver between a need for meaning and scepticism.

  • Illusion and reality – the theatrical space becomes a mirror of the world.

  • Language and silence – speech fills the void, until it wears itself out.

  • Chance, fate and free will – the crash as a metaphor for life and choice.

  • Existence and nothingness – the fragile awareness of “perhaps never having been born”.

Dramaturgical Context

Main characters in Crash Zone

Fred – Emotional, imaginative, and the driving force of the story. He hunts for meaning at all costs and turns every detail into a potential clue.

Dom – Clear-sighted, caustic and rational. He embodies doubt and the refusal of false signs.

Yan – Pragmatic, instinctive, ritualistic. She activates symbolic gestures (photo, candle, sharing the cake) and tips the play towards a kind of derisory sacredness.

→ Together, they form a metaphysical triad: faith, reason and ritual – three ways of resisting the void.

Set and symbolism : The action takes place on a Breton cliff, an abstract location that ultimately reveals itself as the edge of the stage. This minimalist set symbolises both the existential abyss and the threshold between life and fiction. Rain, the rainbow and the candle structure the play like a modest liturgy of passage: from the visible to the invisible.

Temporality : The action unfolds in real time, in a suspended present where past and future fade away. Stage time follows the rhythm of a ritual: a few minutes to say goodbye, only to discover that the farewell may never have taken place at all.

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Copyright

The plays by Jean-Pierre Martinez presented on this site can be downloaded free of charge. However, performance rights, which constitute fair remuneration for the author’s work, are a legal requirement. If you are an amateur or professional company, please click on the COPYRIGHT tab in the menu to obtain performance authorisation.

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