Open Letters La Sketchothèque

Collection of Sketches by Jean-Pierre Martinez

Open Letters is a collection of short sketches, often two-handers, all set in the lobby of an apartment building — around the mailboxes or the rubbish bins — those ordinary objects turned into poetic, absurd, or comic landmarks in a theatre of everyday life.
Each scene brings together sharply contrasting characters — often neighbours, postmen, tenants, homeless people, dentists, exorcists, or strangers — faced with a mundane situation that quickly goes off the rails.

Whether it’s receiving a suspicious parcel, arguing over an entry code, reading a love letter delivered thirty years too late, or taking the rubbish out with a corpse inside, each sketch twists reality with a blend of biting humour, social satire, situational comedy, and sometimes a touch of melancholy or barroom philosophy.

🎭 Neighbourhood theatre: one setting, a thousand faces
The building lobby — that liminal space between inside and outside, public and private — becomes here a stage for social observation, where loneliness, neuroses, fantasies, and misunderstandings meet.
Everything happens in this space of passage, an unremarkable location where the extraordinary suddenly emerges. There’s little action, but plenty of interaction.

🗣️ Lively language and finely honed dialogue
Jean-Pierre Martinez’s style relies on a natural, fluid orality, where verbal humour plays a key role: absurd or offbeat retorts, logical escalation in dialogue (reversal, inversion, shifts in meaning), self-mockery, dark humour, bad faith and guilty conscience — often a cool, unsentimental humour, more cruel than tender.

🧠 Universal themes treated with detachment and irony
Recurring contemporary obsessions surface: urban loneliness, fear of the other / mild paranoia, social hypocrisy, loss of status and erosion of familiar reference points (family, professional, moral), death, inheritance, mail that never arrives, deceptive appearances, administrative absurdity and Kafkaesque logic, the fantasy of transparency or mutual surveillance.
Each theme is approached lightly, ironically, or with detachment, often through a trivial situation that tips into the absurd or the unsettling.

🪞 A mirror of our fragile humanity
Open Letters acts like a kaleidoscope of human relationships, an inventory — sometimes cruel but always humorous — of our attitudes towards:

Others (the neighbour, the squatter, the postman, the stranger)
Ourselves (the past, regret, memory, guilt)
Society (justice, taxes, bureaucracy, housing)

It is also a theatre of pretence, where everyone plays a part for others — and sometimes for themselves. The laughter comes as much from the distortion as from the recognisable, between the grotesque and the true.

🎼 A finale in the form of a philosophical fugue
The closing sketch, Delivery notice, crowns the collection with a poetic, absurd, almost musical note. The postman becomes a messenger of culture in a world where letters and communication have disappeared — a touching metaphor for what remains to be passed on when everything else seems to fade away: letters, notes, words…

Open Letters is a witty, sharp, sometimes cruel collection that makes us laugh while making us think — through the precision of its dialogue, the strength of its situations, and the richness of its subtext. A miniature theatre in the guise of a human comedy, where each sketch is a half-open window onto our absurd lives and contemporary fragilities.

List of sketches

All the texts available on this site can be downloaded for free. However, performance rights, which constitute fair compensation for the author’s work, are a legal obligation. Whether you are an amateur or a professional, you must request authorization to perform the play and pay the corresponding royalties for the production. To get in touch with Jean-Pierre Martinez and ask an authorization to represent one of his works: Contact form.

Download the entire collection free of charge (PDF)