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A dozen or so lightbulbs — all hanging from the ceiling, at eye degree with the forged — body scenes in ingenious methods. For intimate conversations, characters steadily collect round a single bulb, as in the event that they had been talking by candlelight. The actors maintain and swing the lightbulbs like props, and pull a lever onstage to alter the colour scheme at common intervals; at one level, the hanging lights sway within the wind, surrounding the 2 central lovers like fireflies.
That explicit scene can be an early testomony to Jolly’s present for over-the-top theatrics. Silvia and Harlequin, who’ve simply met, circle each other excitedly. Behind them, different forged members, who play sheep in onesies and curly wigs, activate massive wind machines that fire up a blizzard of confetti across the couple and within the auditorium. By the time they kiss, arms outstretched to romantic music, we’re in full-blown operatic territory.
The scene’s craft is obvious, and the sheep counter its inherent cheesiness considerably: Throughout Silvia and Harlequin’s meet-cute, they react in hilarious methods, utilizing old style youngsters’s sound bins to supply sheep noises.
Elsewhere, Jolly makes coarser comedic selections. When the fairy, a delightfully overbearing character 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 fingers — to some gasps from the viewers. Later, to supply Silvia’s handkerchief (right here, a small apron), he searches up and down his pants with an eagerness that implies masturbation.
There is a level of brashness to Jolly’s directing type, which is partly why some French theater critics have by no means actually taken to it. Still, since “Harlequin, Refined by Love,” he has demonstrated a uncommon potential to straddle the lowbrow/intellectual divide that also cleaves a lot of French theater. He has gone backwards and forwards between industrial tasks like “Starmania” and gigs with prestigious public establishments: In 2018, Jolly was awarded the coveted opening spot on the Avignon Festival, earlier than taking up a revered drama middle within the metropolis of Angers, western France, in 2020.
