At 42, Thomas Jolly still looks as youthful as when he made his debut. Thin as a wire – steel wire, that is – with dark eyes that can be either fiery or amused. The man who, from the outset, set himself up as the herald of a new "popular theater," steeped in the codes of modernity, is now at the helm of "the most popular ceremony of all time" by orchestrating the opening of the Olympic Games: An audience of over a billion television viewers worldwide, in addition to the 300,000 or so people who will be able to watch the festivities from the banks of the Seine. Who can beat that?
Jolly has come a long way since he used to cobble together little shows for his family in his bedroom, with opera music, props picked up here and there, and glittery costumes put together by his grandmother – she had long kept her desire to be an actress a secret. It was in La Rue-Saint-Pierre, a tiny village in Normandy, some 20 kilometers northeast of the city of Rouen. "There was a school and a church, but no stores. My parents [printer father, nurse mother] didn't go to the opera. We didn't go to the theater, just to the cinema once or twice a year," the director told Le Monde in 2022. "In a family where nobody went to shows, it's as if I had inherited, without realizing it, a frustrated desire to finally bring it to fruition."
In 1993, at the age of 11, he joined a children's theater company in the suburbs of Rouen, and has been acting ever since. After a degree in theater studies in the nearby city of Caen, he came knocking on the door of the National Theater of Brittany (TNB) drama school in Rennes, because he admired the shows of Stanislas Nordey, who was its director of studies. François Le Pillouër, who directed the TNB at the time, spoke of him as being "a brilliant boy and a very gifted actor, with a strong sparkle in his eyes. He had something of Peter Pan about him. His love of theater radiated out from him, and he knew how to draw others in."
Which is what he did in 2006, when he set up his own company, La Piccola Familia. Jolly had realized that he preferred directing to acting, so he threw himself into staging plays. His determination has never wavered: "I started my career under [former president] Sarkozy. I didn't get to taste the 'before,' which was easier. So, I'm a war machine. I don't have time or money, I just make do," he declared in Le Monde, in 2012.
Right from the start, he made it clear that he didn't want to put blinkers on, staging both Pierre de Marivaux's Arlequin poli par l'amour ("Harlequin, Refined by Love"), and Toâ, by Sacha Guitry, a playwright who had been largely disqualified from public theater. Then came Shakespeare's Henry VI, at France's prestigious Avignon Festival, in 2014. This show thrust Jolly into another dimension. An unparalleled bravura piece: 18 hours of performance, 3 plays, 15 acts, 150 characters, 10,000 lines. Love, adventure, madness and mockery of power, betrayal, a murderous chain of events, reflection on history and its inner workings. Comedy, tragedy, farce, the crudest triviality and the highest metaphysical meditation.
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