They get to the terrace by lift or the safer option of the backstairs to avoid getting caught. They meet out there furtively and successively in twos, threes or fours: the administrative head and the computer programmer, the blonde, brunette, redhead and brown-haired secretaries, the executive director and the courier. By chance, affinities or necessity, the groups mingle and dialogues take form, alternating light-hearted comments, intimate confessions and existential babbling, all in the tone of those great comedies in which the characters are on the verge of the nervous breakdown... The stifling heat –there’s been a drought for the last two years– and the helicopters criss-crossing the sky add an apocalyptic dimension to the burlesque ambiance of this post-modern tableau.
After staging Nikolai Gogol, Marcel Aymé and Federico García Lorca with the Troupe, Lilo Baur has chosen a contemporary Spanish author, Sergi Belbel, drawn to the quality of his dialogues, which offer incredible scope for the actors. At the top of this tower, a symbol of the exercise of power, a fantasy of falling, the terrace is a zone of defensive retreat within the realm of restriction, one she imagines as “a space to think and a small island of emotions”.

Rencontre avec Sergi Belbel, animée par Laurent Mulheisen : 1er décembre à l’issue de la représentation (entrée libre pour la rencontre)

The theme of professional life, although very common in contemporary theatre, was for a long time peripheral. While characters are often qualified by their profession in the classical repertoire, playwrights primarily used this as a way to describe a type rather than, strictly speaking, to portray a trade.

Peasants, soldiers, valets, lackeys, musicians, dancers, masters of all kinds and presidents of parliaments abound in eighteenth-century comedies, as well as financiers, so numerous that there were actors specialised in performing these roles. On the other hand, with the exception of Racine’s Plaideurs (The Litigants), a fierce satire of the legal profession, there are few plays devoted to a specific profession or to the professional world.

In the classical repertoire, while characters are often defined by their profession, playwrights used this as a way to qualify a type, rather than, strictly speaking, to portray a trade.

The theme of work grew in prominence with the advent of the bourgeois drama, invented by Diderot in the eighteenth century, and then in the bourgeois comedies of the nineteenth century. At the end of the century there were even a few plays devoted to the working class, particularly in the productions staged by André Antoine.

t wasn’t until the second half of the twentieth century, with the industrial revolution having taken its toll, that the factory environment and then that of the company were used as play settings by dramatists. From Brecht’s The Resistible Ascension of Arturo Ui to Michel Vinaver (L’Ordinaire,La Demande d’emploi) Pietro Pizzuti (7 minutes, a Readers’ Bureau selection) and Sergi Belbel (Après la pluie), the theme of the working world moved from the margins to centre stage at the Comédie-Française.

Staging: Lilo Baur
Scenography: Andrew D Edwards
Costumes: Agnès Falque
Lights: Fabrice Kebour
Original music: Mich Ochowiak
Make-up and hairstyling : Catherine Bloquère
Assistant stage manager: Aoife Hinds