A sketch comedy by Jean-Pierre Martinez
English translation by the author
The cast size and gender distribution are highly variable with around forty male or female roles. The same actor may play multiple roles.
To work or not to work, that is the question.
During a break for electronic cigarettes, a few workaholics exchange hazy remarks.
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Losing Your Life to Earn a Living: Work as an Addiction…
Sixteen scenes take place on the smoking terrace of an office tower. Employees, managers, temporary workers and executives meet there for the duration of a cigarette before returning to their desks. Some characters reappear, while events mentioned from one scene to the next gradually connect the different companies in the building into a single working community.
This break area provides an especially fertile theatrical setting. Located on the margins of the offices, the terrace briefly frees people to speak: they talk about colleagues, ambitions, love affairs, failures and fears for the future. Stories echo one another, characters cross paths without necessarily knowing each other, and jokes circulate from one sketch to the next, giving the whole piece the coherence of an ensemble comedy.
The title then takes on its full meaning: the addiction is not only to tobacco, but to work itself. People dream of resigning, moving abroad or starting a new life, while at the same time fearing the loss of their jobs. Offshoring, finance, insecurity, hierarchy, retirement and the disappearance of public services all feed a satire of an economic world in which everyone seems to have become trapped by their own position. Even feelings, illness and death are eventually absorbed into the logic of the company.
Beneath the black humour lies a deeper unease: after spending so much of their lives working in order to live, the characters sometimes feel that their real existence is taking place elsewhere, without them. The cigarette break becomes the last moment when they can still look at the world, meet someone or imagine an escape. The final procession of employees transformed into the living dead provides a striking image of this collective alienation: behind the social comedy, Bureaux et dépendances asks what remains of life when work has taken up almost all of it.