One by one, Mr Stuck, Mr Borchert and Mrs Ariane meet with Mrs Mira of the Fatum agency, who is responsible for 'reformatting' their personalities to fit them for a faultless professional career. The different interviews and encounters gradually turn into a dangerous and uncontrollable role play, in a place which ultimately proves to be a prison.

Handikap is a comedy which draws its strength from the economy of means: four characters, a strict framework restricted to the three unities, concise dialogue. The play is less an ironic denunciation of Western society than an absurd exaggeration of the way companies operate, taken as a metaphor for the real contemporary world. Candidates for a job must recreate their personalities so that they become 'fitters-in' and 'go-getters'. A cynical world where the truth of the people themselves is diluted in a game of call-my-bluff. The plot hinges on the confrontation between half-feigned, half-sincere roles; structured as a series of cruel and amusing misunderstandings. The confrontation can be read on several levels: the struggle of individuals for their freedom, the struggle of the characters to resist dramatic convention and to exist as themselves on stage, the struggle of cold, dry and often intractable writing against the expectations of realism. Nonetheless, the stylization fearlessly refers to and flaunts dramatic conventions. The roles sometimes recall the writing style of opera librettos (Mozart's "Cosi fan tutte" comes to mind): the characters' voices are like scores with their own themes, the speeches echo each other from one scene to the next, sometimes the characters blend their voices in unison, sometimes they speak asides in full view of the others... Effects of exaggeration and comedy which combine commentary on dramatic writing with criticism of reality.