A batch or so lightbulbs — all placing from the ceiling, at optical stage with the forged — body scenes in impish tactics. For intimate conversations, characters regularly pack round a unmarried bulb, as though they have been talking by means of candlelight. The actors stock and swing the lightbulbs like props, and remove a lever onstage to switch the colour scheme at habitual periods; at one level, the placing lighting fixtures sway within the air, environment the 2 central fanatics like fireflies.
That exact scene may be an early testomony to Jolly’s reward for over-the-top theatrics. Silvia and Harlequin, who’ve simply met, circle one every other excitedly. In the back of them, alternative forged participants, who play games sheep in onesies and curly wigs, activate immense air machines that fire up a snowfall of confetti across the couple and within the auditorium. Through the day they kiss, palms outstretched to romantic tune, we’re in full-blown operatic dimension.
The scene’s craft is seen, and the sheep counter its inherent cheesiness moderately: All the way through Silvia and Harlequin’s meet-cute, they react in hilarious tactics, the usage of outdated kids’s tone gardens to manufacture sheep noises.
In other places, Jolly makes coarser comedic possible choices. When the fairy, a delightfully overbearing personality within the arms of Clémence Solignac, asks the nonetheless uncivilized Harlequin to kiss her hand, it turns right into a pantomime of fellatio on her hands — to a couple of gasps from the target audience. Next, to manufacture Silvia’s handkerchief (right here, a petite apron), he searches up and indisposed his pants with a fervour that means masturbation.
There’s a level of brashness to Jolly’s directing taste, which is partially why some French theater critics have by no means in point of fact taken to it. Nonetheless, since “Harlequin, Refined by Love,” he has demonstrated an extraordinary skill to straddle the lowbrow/intellectual divide that also cleaves a lot of French theater. He has long past backward and forward between industrial tasks like “Starmania” and gigs with prestigious community establishments: In 2018, Jolly used to be awarded the coveted opening spot on the Avignon Competition, sooner than taking up a revered drama heart within the town of Angers, western France, in 2020.
