Crisis and Punishment

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In Crisis and Punishment, Jean-Pierre Martinez delivers a biting satirical comedy about the banking world, seen through the misadventures of James Carpenter, an unemployed actor sent by the Job Centre to work in a major financial institution on the brink of collapse. Assigned to the enigmatic “Customer Support Department”, he soon discovers the true nature of the job: serving as a physical scapegoat for ruined clients, a human punching bag who must hold the bank’s symbolic guilt. Slapped, insulted, hit, threatened at gunpoint, and eventually mythologised, James becomes the official martyr of a system in free fall.
Manipulated by Dom, the authoritarian and disturbingly charismatic manager, and assisted by Sam, an unsettlingly compliant administrative aide, James sinks into a bureaucratic nightmare where absurdity masquerades as procedure. As the boundaries between reality, hallucination and dream erode, the play exposes a world where financial crisis legitimises violence, humiliation becomes a job description, and sacrifice is institutionalised — until the ambiguous final twist.

Date of writing2012

Number of characters4, 5 or 6 characters

Cast4 roles: 1 man / 3 women, or 2 men / 2 women. 5 roles: 1 man / 4 women, or 2 men / 3 women. 6 roles: 1 man / 5 women, or 2 men / 4 women (Multiple female characters may be played by the same actor.)

Stage setA fixed set representing an intimidating executive office: a large desk with a two-button phone/intercom (green & red), an overstuffed swivel chair, a side table holding a funeral urn disguised as a metal flask, and the imposing portrait of James’s predecessor overlooking the scene.

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Genre Overview

In Crisis and Punishment, surrealism does not arise from inner psychological turmoil but from the derailment of public and institutional reality. The play opens in a seemingly realistic register — an unemployed actor recruited by a collapsing bank — before the rational framework gradually fractures.

This satirical black comedy blends farce (physical excess, slaps, grotesque violence), elements of the Theatre of the Absurd (illogical procedures, bureaucratic rituals, irrational authority), and a sociopolitical critique of power dynamics. Martinez constructs a miniature dystopia where corporate language sanitises brutality, where guilt is outsourced, and where sacrifice becomes policy.
The laughter is uneasy: caricature shades into nightmare, and humour reveals the violence embedded in economic systems pushed to their extremes.

Satirical comedy, Social farce, Contemporary absurdist theatre, Dark comedy, Bureaucratic dystopia

Thematic Panorama

The play directly addresses the human consequences of financial crisis: fear of job loss, erosion of moral boundaries, and the rationalisation of abuse in the name of efficiency.

James embodies the precarious worker, exploited and manipulated, willingly accepting humiliation as a condition of survival. Through the recurring figure of the scapegoat — promoted here to a formal job position — Martinez shows how violence is redistributed downwards in times of economic turmoil.
Language itself becomes a tool of domination: euphemisms, managerial jargon, and pseudo-rational justifications normalise cruelty.
By exposing the contradictions of neoliberal logic, the play depicts a world where individuals are crushed by mechanisms that exceed them, where responsibility is diffused, and where suffering is repackaged as “performance”.

Dramaturgical Context

Within Martinez’s theatrical universe, Crisis and Punishment belongs to the works where social realism slowly mutates into burlesque dystopia. The single location — an executive office — becomes a ritualised space of power, confinement, and staged punishment.
James, a displaced actor, serves as the audience’s surrogate: discovering with us an environment governed by absurd rules that nevertheless remain perfectly coherent for those inside it.

The contemporary temporal setting is punctuated with dreamlike or hallucinatory elements (the urn, the apparition-like final scenes), amplifying the play’s nightmare quality.

Recurring motifs — ritualised humiliation, the portrait of the deceased predecessor, blinking alarms, queues of vengeful clients — form a sacrificial pattern.
Martinez thus exposes how hierarchical systems generate their own mythologies: corporate saints and martyrs, symbolic ritual, pseudo-religious language. This machinery, pushed to its extreme, reveals sharp social critique beneath the mask of laughter.

Character types / functions : Corporate managers, Precarious employees, Wealthy clients, Unemployed actor, Subordinate staff

Set elements: Executive office, Binary intercom, Funeral urn, Enclosed workspace, Site of hierarchical domination

Temporal setting: Contemporary, Economic crisis, Professional daily life, Linear time tinged with dreamlike intrusion

Motifs : Nightmares, Red button, Slap, Funeral urn, Portrait of predecessor, Financial collapse, Guilt & punishment, Scapegoat figure, Sacrificial logic

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Copyright

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