Comedy Plays About Contemporary Issues
A selection of comedy plays by Jean-Pierre Martinez exploring contemporary social and political issues through satire, black comedy, absurdity, dystopia and participatory theatre.
Contemporary Questions, Theatrical Answers
Can theatre address politics, climate change, money, misinformation or authoritarianism without becoming a lecture?
Jean-Pierre Martinez’s social and political comedies approach contemporary issues through satire, black comedy, absurdity, dystopia, historical speculation and participatory theatre. Rather than delivering ready-made answers, they place ordinary characters in extraordinary situations and allow contradictions to emerge through action, conflict and laughter.
For producers, artistic directors and theatre directors looking for entertaining plays with something to say, this selection brings together works that combine accessible theatrical premises with questions that resonate far beyond their original context.
Some have already travelled extensively across languages and countries. Others are more recent works offering new possibilities for professional production.
Contemporary issues · Comedy and satire · Flexible theatrical forms · International translations · Scripts available in English
Power, Democracy and Individual Responsibility
What happens when political systems begin to fail? Who is responsible: those who govern, those who obey, or those who remain silent?
These plays approach politics not through ideological demonstration, but through individual choices, moral dilemmas and the absurd mechanics of power.
The Rope
2 characters · 2 men · Political and dramatic comedy
In a country ruled by a dictator, a military doctor and a priest discover that the tyrant’s life may depend on information they alone possess. Their professional duties demand that they save him. Their duties as citizens may suggest otherwise.
What the play explores
The Rope turns a political question into an intimate moral confrontation. Rather than asking whether dictatorship is wrong, it asks something more uncomfortable: what is an individual entitled — or obliged — to do when ordinary morality helps an immoral system survive?
Medicine, religion, professional secrecy, civil disobedience and political violence collide in a two-character closed-room drama in which neither position provides an easy answer.
The play was first produced in Colombia in 2025.
King of Fools
5 or 6 characters · Highly flexible casting · Political satire
With a presidential election approaching, a political party heading for disaster chooses a deliberately hopeless candidate to take the blame for its defeat. But the chosen fool proves unpredictable — and so do the voters.
What the play explores
Rather than parodying one particular political party or country, King of Fools examines electoral strategy, political communication, populism and the illusion that voters can always be manipulated.
The comedy works through the widening gap between what political professionals plan and what actually happens once citizens enter the equation.
Its portability has already been demonstrated through productions in countries including Peru, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Romania, Iran, Spain, Argentina and Portugal.
Check to the Kings
8 characters · Highly flexible male/female casting · Political satire
Politics often resembles a game of chess in which morality matters less than strategy. A king, a queen and those scheming to replace them are ready to sacrifice any number of pawns in order to remain in power.
What the play explores
Check to the Kings uses the chessboard as a metaphor for political power, authoritarianism, institutional manipulation and the endless cycle through which yesterday’s opponents can become tomorrow’s rulers.
The setting is deliberately detached from any specific country or period. Behind the monarchy lies a recognisably contemporary political system in which elections can be manipulated, crises exploited, fear manufactured and democratic institutions emptied of their meaning.
The comedy does not oppose virtuous democrats to obvious tyrants. Instead, it examines how ambition, opportunism and the desire to hold power can gradually corrupt every side of the political game.
With eight characters and several gender-flexible roles, the play also offers a larger ensemble format than most works in this selection.
The play has been produced in France, Burkina Faso and Mexico. In 2022, the Burkina Faso production was staged by Grâce Théâtre in Ouagadougou, directed by Paul Zoungrana.
A Thwarted Vocation
2 characters · 1 man, 1 woman · Historical tragicomedy
A young student applies to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. More than a century earlier, another candidate was rejected by the same institution: Adolf Hitler. What if one apparently insignificant decision could change history?
What the play explores
Using alternative history and time travel, the play avoids a conventional historical reconstruction and instead turns the past into a theatrical experiment.
Can history be changed by changing one individual destiny? Would preventing one catastrophe simply produce another? Are individuals responsible for consequences they could never have foreseen?
The comic device gradually opens onto questions of free will, determinism, personal responsibility and the dangerous temptation to rewrite history with hindsight.
Money, Work and Social Success
Money is rarely just money. It determines status, relationships, power and sometimes even identity.
These three comedies approach economic questions through very different theatrical forms: absurdist farce, political boulevard comedy and a dark comedy about literary success.
Crisis and Punishment
4 to 7 characters · Flexible casting · Absurd social comedy
An unemployed actor accepts an administrative job in a bank on the verge of bankruptcy. He soon discovers why he was hired: his real function is to serve, quite literally, as the institution’s scapegoat.
What the play explores
The financial crisis becomes an absurd theatrical machine in which responsibility always travels downward. Behind the farce lie questions about unemployment, corporate responsibility, financial institutions, inequality and the social need to find someone to blame when a system collapses.
The play has proved particularly adaptable internationally, with productions in Switzerland, Iran, Bulgaria, Turkey, Spain, Argentina, Uruguay, Ukraine, Honduras and elsewhere.
Discover Crisis and Punishment →
A Simple Business Dinner
3 characters · 2 men, 1 woman · Political and social comedy
A CEO invites a minister to dinner in the hope of securing a lucrative contract and hires an escort to help close the deal. Unfortunately, the woman who arrives thinks she has simply been hired to serve the food.
What the play explores
The structure is that of a fast-moving situation comedy, but the subject is the porous boundary between political power, economic influence and private interests.
Corruption is never discussed abstractly: it takes physical form around a dinner table, where everyone is trying to sell or buy something, a contract, an influence, an image or themselves.
The play has also been staged outside France, including productions in Spain, Nicaragua, Bulgaria and Cambodia.
Discover A Simple Business Dinner →
Cheaters
3 characters · Flexible male/female configuration · Dark comedy
A novelist has achieved everything a writer could dream of: critical acclaim, literary prestige and public recognition. Then a stranger arrives who could reveal that his entire success rests on a stolen manuscript.
What the play explores
Cheaters begins with plagiarism but reaches much further into questions of authorship, cultural legitimacy, recognition, social status and the ownership of another person’s story. Who owns a work: the person who lived it, the person who wrote it, or the person whose name appears on the cover? The comedy places artistic creation inside the same competitive economy as any other form of social success.
The play has been produced in France, Nigeria and the United States, with a Bulgarian production documented in 2026.
Information, Surveillance and Manipulation
Who controls reality when information itself can be manufactured?
These plays use two radically different settings — a dystopian quarantine and a dying village bar — to explore the way fear, rumours and narratives can reshape society.
Quarantine
4 characters · Gender-flexible casting · Dystopian comedy
Four strangers are confined in an abandoned theatre because they are supposedly contaminated. Behind an imaginary two-way mirror, another group observes them: the audience. As the confinement continues, it becomes increasingly doubtful that the supposed virus is biological at all.
What the play explores
Written just before the Covid pandemic, Quarantine uses the language of contamination to examine surveillance, authoritarianism, fear, ideological conformity and the mechanisms through which exceptional measures can become permanent instruments of control.
The theatrical form reinforces the theme: the audience is not simply watching the prisoners — it occupies the position of those who monitor them.
The play has travelled widely, with productions in Portugal, Argentina, Nigeria and North Macedonia. In 2023, the Gostivar Theatre production was presented at the Moisiu Festival of National Theatres in Tirana.
The President’s Draw
6 to 10 actors · Highly flexible casting · Social and political comedy
In the only surviving bar of a village emptied by rural exodus, the owners and their few remaining customers amuse themselves by inventing fake news stories. Then some of those inventions begin to look suspiciously like self-fulfilling prophecies.
What the play explores
Fake news is only one layer of the play. Behind it lies another contemporary issue: the abandonment of rural communities and the desperate need of forgotten places to make themselves visible. The comedy shows misinformation not simply as something imposed from above by governments or media organisations, but as something ordinary people may produce themselves when reality no longer seems capable of offering them a future.
The play has been staged in France, Portugal and Brazil.
Climate, Catastrophe and Our Collective Future
Climate change poses a particular challenge for theatre.
The facts are known. Repeating them is not enough.
These plays therefore approach ecological catastrophe indirectly: through science fiction, audience participation, black humour and music, asking not only what is happening to the planet but why humanity remains unable to act despite knowing what lies ahead.
Surviving Mankind
4 characters · 2 men, 2 women · Ecological tragicomedy
Earth has become uninhabitable. Four survivors are preparing to leave aboard a spacecraft bound for a planet that may offer humanity one final chance. Then one of them asks an awkward question: Does mankind deserve to be saved?
What the play explores
The ecological catastrophe has already happened. The debate is no longer about how to prevent it, but about whether a species responsible for destroying its own world has the moral right to colonise another.
By moving the action beyond the point of no return, Surviving Mankind turns ecological theatre into a debate about responsibility, survival and the human tendency to reproduce the very behaviour that brought disaster about.
Just a Moment Before the End of the World
4 characters · Gender-neutral casting · Participatory theatre
Three strangers believe they have been summoned to serve on a jury. Instead, they discover that they have been brought together to decide how society should respond to an unavoidable catastrophe about to strike the world. And the audience will also have a say.
What the play explores
The central subject is not catastrophe itself but collective decision-making when every possible choice has unacceptable consequences.
The participatory structure turns spectators into citizens. They are invited to vote and influence the characters’ decisions, making democracy not merely the subject of the play but part of its theatrical mechanism.
Discover Just a Moment Before the End of the World →
Apocalypse – A Musical Tragicomedy
Variable cast · One or more duos · Musical tragicomedy
Heatwaves arrive earlier, last longer and grow more severe. Humanity knows where this trajectory is leading and possesses much of the knowledge required to change course. Yet nothing really changes.
What the play explores
Apocalypse approaches climate change as a form of contemporary tragedy: we can foresee the ending, but seem collectively incapable of preventing it.
A sequence of sketches and original songs combines scientific anxiety, political satire, climate scepticism, consumer behaviour and reflections on humanity’s possible extinction.
The form deliberately avoids the conventional environmental lecture. Humour and music create distance, while the recurring awareness of an approaching catastrophe supplies the tragic structure.
The work is designed for a variable number of performers and can combine actors, singers, live musicians or recorded accompaniment, offering considerable freedom in production.
Comedy as a Space for Debate
These plays do not attempt to tell audiences what to think.
Their starting point is almost the opposite: theatre becomes interesting when characters cannot agree.
A comedy can address dictatorship without becoming a political speech, climate change without becoming a scientific conference, and money without turning into an economics lesson.
Humour creates the distance necessary to look at familiar issues differently. Satire exposes contradictions. Dystopia pushes present tendencies slightly further. Absurdity reveals the irrationality hidden inside supposedly rational systems.
Above all, theatre places ideas inside conflicts between people.
That is what makes these plays both comedies and plays about contemporary society.
Read Before You Produce
The complete scripts of Jean-Pierre Martinez’s plays can be read and downloaded free of charge.
Many are available in several languages, and several offer flexible casting configurations.
Browse all plays in English →
Browse plays by cast size →
Browse plays by genre →
Performance Rights and Professional Productions
Jean-Pierre Martinez is a member of SACD – Société des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques.
Public performances require prior authorisation and payment of performance rights. Depending on the country, rights are administered through SACD or its partner organisations and representatives.
For a professional project, you can also contact us regarding:
- available translations;
- alternative casting versions;
- previous productions;
- territorial rights;
- or any other question before applying for performance authorisation.