'Harlequin, Refined by Love' Review: A French Showman's First Steps - The New York Times

In three months, the French theater director Thomas Jolly will oversee the most monumental show in the world: the opening bash for the Olympic Games, set for July 26. But for now, his work is entertaining Paris audiences on a more modest scale.

At the Maison des Arts in Créteil, an eastern suburb of the city, his work is not even playing on the biggest stage. On Thursday, an audience of around 250 people filed into the playhouse’s second, smaller auditorium to watch “Harlequin, Refined by Love” (“Arlequin poli par l’amour”), Jolly’s very first stage production, created in 2006.

At the time, Jolly was a young graduate from the drama school attached to the National Theater of Brittany. “Harlequin, Refined by Love” was an unlikely choice of play for a budding director: Written in 1720 by Pierre de Marivaux, a master of romantic comedy, it taps heavily into the commedia dell’arte, a genre few current French theatermakers have explored.

Yet “Harlequin, Refined by Love” became a box-office hit, touring for four years with its initial cast, followed by frequent revivals. (In 2014, a Russian-language version even joined the repertoire of the Gogol Center, in Moscow.) In Créteil, the production’s success is easy to understand. Even with minimal sets and props, the building blocks of Jolly’s style — visually flamboyant, brightly paced yet with a touch of dark satire — are already there.

Marivaux’s compact play is built around stock comic characters. The hapless hero, Harlequin (Rémi Dessenoix), has been kidnapped by a fairy who fell for his beauty. She tries to educate him, yet Harlequin remains something of a slob — until he meets his match, the shepherdess Silvia (played with spot-on candor by Ophélie Trichard).

Falling for her suddenly “refines” his manners, as the play’s title makes clear. Love, in Marivaux’s world, is a civilizing force — much to the fairy’s fury.

Throughout, Jolly strikes a mostly happy balance between classic farce and modern touches. While several members of the five-strong cast wear white face paint, in the commedia dell’arte tradition, the makeup is applied lightly, without overly exaggerated features, and the costumes are a stylistic hodgepodge. Trivelin, the fairy’s servant, wears striped socks and a top hat, but Silvia makes her entrance in a minidress, and Harlequin spends much of the play in white boxer shorts.

That’s hardly an unusual approach, but what immediately elevates “Harlequin, Refined by Love” is Jolly’s use of light to move the action along. It has become something of a signature in the years since, culminating in the eye-popping laser and spotlight choreography he deployed for “Starmania,” the popular French musical he directed in 2022. Back in 2006, Jolly, who is co-credited with the production’s lighting design along with Jean-François Lelong, was already milking more limited technical means.

A dozen or so lightbulbs — all hanging from the ceiling, at eye level with the cast — frame scenes in ingenious ways. For intimate conversations, characters frequently gather around a single bulb, as if they were speaking by candlelight. The actors hold and swing the lightbulbs like props, and pull a lever onstage to change the color scheme at regular intervals; at one point, the hanging lights sway in the wind, surrounding the two central lovers like fireflies.

That particular scene is also an early testament to Jolly’s gift for over-the-top theatrics. Silvia and Harlequin, who have just met, circle one another excitedly. Behind them, other cast members, who play sheep in onesies and curly wigs, turn on large wind machines that stir up a blizzard of confetti around the couple and in the auditorium. By the time they kiss, arms outstretched to romantic music, we are in full-blown operatic territory.

The scene’s craft is evident, and the sheep counter its inherent cheesiness somewhat: Throughout Silvia and Harlequin’s meet-cute, they react in hilarious ways, using old-fashioned children’s sound boxes to produce sheep noises.

Elsewhere, Jolly makes coarser comedic choices. When the fairy, a delightfully overbearing character in the hands of Clémence Solignac, asks the still uncivilized Harlequin to kiss her hand, it turns into a pantomime of fellatio on her fingers — to a few gasps from the audience. Later, to produce Silvia’s handkerchief (here, a small apron), he searches up and down his pants with an eagerness that suggests masturbation.

There is a degree of brashness to Jolly’s directing style, which is partly why some French theater critics have never really taken to it. Still, since “Harlequin, Refined by Love,” he has demonstrated a rare ability to straddle the lowbrow/highbrow divide that still cleaves much of French theater. He has gone back and forth between commercial projects like “Starmania” and gigs with prestigious public institutions: In 2018, Jolly was awarded the coveted opening spot at the Avignon Festival, before taking over a respected drama center in the city of Angers, western France, in 2020.

And what has endeared Jolly to many is the somber irony that regularly tempers his showmanship. “Harlequin, Refined by Love” takes a serious turn in the last scene when Harlequin steals the fairy’s wand. He doesn’t merely use it to free himself and Silvia, but develops a sudden thirst for power that is only hinted at in Marivaux’s original. “Afterwards, we’ll go and make ourselves king somewhere,” is the character’s final line, and, wearing a long black coat, Jolly’s Harlequin suddenly turns deadly serious. Rock music booms. When Silvia, frightened, refuses to join the would-be dictator, he simply leaves without her.

Ruthless, amoral kings and political players later became central to Jolly’s output. From a well-received, 18-hour Shakespeare trilogy to his gory “Thyeste” at the Avignon Festival, the scale of his work also grew at an impressive pace in the wake of “Harlequin, Refined by Love.” His next projects, as the artistic director of the Olympic and the Paralympic ceremonies, will be on another level entirely — a mammoth opening spectacle set to unfold on and around the Seine River. Paris’s electricity grid better be ready.

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2024-04-26 18:29:38Z

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