Après la pluie

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.