Now and then, a Collection of Sketches by Jean-Pierre Martinez
Now and then is a collection of eleven short sketches, each constructed as a fragment of life, a dialogue or an absurd situation — funny, tender or tragic. Through a wide variety of scenes, Jean-Pierre Martinez explores time, waiting, memory, death, love, inheritance, routine, the planet, progress… and mortality.
Whether they are prehistoric people searching for fire, a couple trapped in their living room, disillusioned school-leavers or post-human beings looking back at a vanished Earth, all the characters are confronted with a crack in their everyday reality: an inconsistency, a revelation, a hint of strangeness that opens the way to reflection, vertigo or laughter.
- The Sacred Fire
- Home Cinema
- Grown Up
- French Toast
- The Door
- Double Living
- Here’s Earth
- Vehicule inspection
- Waiting
- The Painting
- The Ghosts
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Analysis
🎭 The Absurdity of Everyday Life
As so often in Martinez’s work, the comedy arises from a shift in perspective: rational logic applied to absurd situations, or the reverse. We laugh at an apparently ordinary conversation that gradually veers into a wildly improbable hypothesis, yet one developed with rigorous logic.
Like Beckett, Ionesco or Dubillard, the author observes the human condition through its most ordinary manifestations and pushes them to their existential limits. Laughter then becomes a refuge from the absurd, a form of resistance to the emptiness of the world.
🕰 Time as the Main Character
The past intrudes in the form of inheritance (The Painting), blurred memories (Home Cinema), or an imagined prehistory (The Sacred Fire).
The present is often drained of meaning (The Door, French Toast, Vehicle Inspection), suspended in a state of waiting or repetition.
The future, meanwhile, is glimpsed through dystopia (This Is Earth, The Ghosts).
The very structure of the sketches reflects this tension: they are brief, suspended, often unresolved, like moments stolen from eternity.
👥 Dialogue Rooted in Character
The writing relies almost entirely on dialogue, which is fluid, natural and inherently theatrical: the characters are sketched in just a few lines, through their rhythm, their logic and their tone. The style is lively, with few unnecessary stage directions, leaving considerable freedom for performance and interpretation.
The duos are varied:
Modern couples (Home Cinema, French Toast, Double Living)
Unlikely encounters (The Door, Vehicle Inspection)
Symbolic figures (parent and child in The Ghosts, planet and human being in This Is Earth, the dead in Waiting)
These pairings bring two visions of the world face to face, two ways of speaking, thinking and clinging to something.
🧠 A Critical, Poetic and Political Perspective
Without ever becoming dogmatic, the collection conveys a lucid and critical vision of the world, sometimes serious beneath the humour:
Ecological criticism and a questioning of technological progress (The Sacred Fire, Here’s Earth, The Ghosts)
Criticism of the world of work (The Door, Vehicle Inspection)
Criticism of educational, political and healthcare systems (Waiting)
Yet this criticism is always conveyed through poetry, suggestion or comic displacement, never becoming a manifesto.
Now and Then is a collection in which every sketch becomes a parable, a suspended moment in which the author casts light on one corner of existence. It is theatre that is both accessible and profound, moving from laughter to reflection in just a few lines.
Minimalist, humanist and philosophical theatre, driven by subtle humour and a genuine tenderness for the absurdity of the human condition.