In November 2022, having just been appointed Artistic Director of the Olympic Games, Thomas Jolly changed his life. He resigned from Le Quai, the national drama center he directed since 2020, in western France, and embarked on a special adventure: The Olympic Games.
Yet another challenge for the theater artist, who in 2014 offered audiences 18 hours of an extraordinary Shakespearean performance (Henry VI). The director likes to cross boundaries. A creator of operas, he is also the man who, in 2022, breathed new life into the musical Starmania. All these experiences led him to take charge of the four ceremonies of the Olympic and Paralympic Games. In an interview with Le Monde, he looks back on the highlights, settles a few scores with the theater world and looks into the future with a still uncertain eye.
Honestly? Absolutely not! Everything came together as soon as I was appointed in September 2022. Since the end of July, we've had to release a ceremony every two weeks. I haven't even had time to watch them on television. I attended the last three from the control room or the stands, at La Concorde and the Stade de France. It was like a mix between staging an XXL opera and my experience of the Cour d'honneur in Avignon. At the opera, a hundred or so people coordinate the work. Here, there were 20,000. It was enormous and nothing like an ordinary show.
It was more like a marathon, with four hurdles at the end. An incredible number of ideas were lined up on the starting line, and countless obstacles presented themselves in front of each of them. The budget, the technique, but also the weather, heritage, safety, the river and its bridges, the stability of the quays, and so on. The marathon consisted, for me and my team, in transforming our ideas without denying our initial intentions, while at the same time getting through the hurdles.
We managed it, even on July 26 in the pouring rain. I was devastated. I cried all day. But, in reality, the rain gave us immediacy. We were all – the public, the technical teams, the athletes – under the same unifying water. It brought us together. That day, the Paris weather decided the story.
There was something of the impossible in Thierry Reboul's, executive director of the Olympic Ceremonies, project. This man moves frames. By announcing an opening onto the Seine, he created such a shock of reality that skepticism arose.
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