Nicotine

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Nicotine paints a fragmented, sharp and darkly comic portrait of a workplace that has drifted into absurdity. On the smoking terrace of a large corporation, a parade of employees passes through the day as though navigating a succession of micro-crises: stressed managers, disillusioned interns, security guards, IT technicians, senior executives, temps, HR officers and sales reps — all revealing their anxieties, ambitions and self-deceptions. Through these encounters emerge the torments of contemporary working life: outsourcing, workplace burnout, layoffs, corporate suicides, security paranoia, toxic coaching, ecological guilt and an obsession with productivity.

Alternately hilarious and unsettling, these scenes form a choral mosaic in which everyone struggles to survive inside a system that surpasses — and often crushes — them. The result is a social comedy that is both light and ferocious, holding up a mirror to a professional world in permanent freefall.

Date of writing2013

Number of charactersAround 25 characters

CastFlexible and modular casting depending on the scenes (approximately 20 to 25 short roles; doubling possible).

Stage setThe smoking terrace of a large office complex.

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Genre Overview

Nicotine exemplifies objectivist social comedy: a theatre that scrutinises everyday gestures to reveal the structures that produce them. A theatre of the minimal, where laughter slips into the tiny malfunctions of an over-engineered system. A theatre that shows how modern society reduces individuals to functions — yet how, beneath this mechanisation, a fragile humanity still flickers.

Firmly rooted in Jean-Pierre Martinez’s satirical and comedic vein, the play observes the working world as an absurd stage on which everyone performs an assigned role. Its choral, fragmented form multiplies points of view and gradually exposes the grotesque texture of modern corporate life. A social comedy that veers at times into burlesque and at others into dystopian overtones, the play explores the contradictions of a universe in which the human seems dissolved in procedures, performance indicators and internal communication. Humour arises from the dissonance between managerial discourse and lived reality, revealing the vulnerability of those who appear outwardly solid.

Thematic Panorama

The play probes the condition of today’s wage earners, torn between aspirations to well-being and the symbolic violence of corporate culture. Through short scenes, it exposes the tensions running through the contemporary workplace: fear of failure, permanent threat of unemployment, loss of meaning, emotional isolation. The smoking terrace becomes a confessional space where employees briefly let slip their truths, far from the corporate language they are obliged to perform.

The play also addresses the robotisation of human interactions, omnipresent surveillance, risk management, power dynamics and survival strategies. Environmental concerns, managerial drift and social fractures surface as well. What emerges is a mosaic of collective anxieties in which laughter acts as a revealer of deeper wounds — not to analyse them, but to show how they inhabit ordinary people.

Dramaturgical Context

Nicotine belongs to Martinez’s family of “mosaic plays,” structured as a succession of autonomous fragments tied together by a single location. This smoking terrace — a marginal zone at the edge of the building — functions as a dramaturgical airlock: neither inside nor outside, it is a neutral ground where hierarchical masks slip. The setting is strictly contemporary, but realism is tinged with absurdity, heightening the grotesque quality of certain situations, as if the space itself generated a faint dystopia.

The characters — managers, assistants, heads of department, interns, CEOs, or bit-players of corporate power — embody the sociological spectrum of a large company without ever becoming rigid stereotypes. Each passes through the space carrying personal burdens, neuroses, ambitions or illusions. Recurring motifs (tobacco, safety drills, toxic leadership, workplace hazards, internal communication, outsourcing, burnout, greenwashing) weave connections between scenes, transforming this banal space into a miniature observatory of society.

The play thus offers a kaleidoscopic, almost cinematic portrait of working life as it is experienced daily — without explanatory distance, but with sharp humour, empathy and a lucid awareness of systemic absurdity.

Character types / functions: Executives, Office staff, Interns, HR directors, CEOs, Security personnel, Technicians, Consultants, Union members
Set: Smoking terrace, Corporate exterior, Liminal space, Transitional zone
Temporal setting: Contemporary, Everyday professional life, Fragmented time, Realistic present
Motifs: Tobacco, Workplace pressure, Layoffs, Surveillance, Toxic coaching, Workplace accidents, Corporate suicide, Security paranoia, Company rumours

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