Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic When Thomas Jolly was announced as the director of the opening and closing ceremonies for both the Paris Olympics and Paralympics, the French theatre world had every reason to pop the champagne. The biggest show on Earth had just been handed to a product of the country’s state-funded theatre system — a child who had escaped bullying thanks to his state-school drama programme, found success with flamboyant productions of Shakespeare and led a prestigious regional theatre centre.Yet the prominent leftwing newspaper Libération immediately decried the Olympic choice. In an article scoffing at the 42-year-old’s “pompous aesthetic”, culture writer Ève Beauvallet painted a dystopian picture of a Jolly-made opening ceremony, with performers “dressed as goth gremlins vaguely out of a Cure music video”, cast in “embarrassing scenes that hearken back to the most spluttering displays of inept 20th-century drama lessons”.Jolly may be breathing rarefied air as the real ceremony nears — he spoke recently on the top floor of a hotel offering panoramic views of the Seine, the bold setting of Friday’s extravaganza — but he still smarts at the “brutality” of his own milieu two years ago. He was “forced”, he says, to quit his directorial position in Angers and accused of leaving France’s state institutions behind. “As if I were some pirate of public service,” Jolly adds, leaning forward in energetic disbelief.Magnified by the Olympic spotlight, his rise has crystallised deep-rooted tensions around the gulf between two production models in French theatre. On the one hand, the country operates a large network of subsidised venues and companies: known colloquially as “public theatre”, it mushroomed after the second world war as a way to bring highbrow culture to audiences outside Paris. On the other hand, there is the commercial sector, or “private theatre” — shows that rely entirely on box-office revenue.In France, the distinction has been so seminal that each model comes with its own artistic expectations. Public theatre has gained a reputation as cerebral, director-led and often experimental, with its proponents frequently looking down on the commercial sector as pandering and unsophisticated. Jolly’s cardinal sin has been to straddle that aesthetic divide. While he is a fierce advocate of state-funded theatre, which he says “saved his life” as a gay teenager, many see him as leaning too far into American-style entertainment, a red line in French intellectual circles.It all started with stage lights — a lot of them. Since his first turn as director, a 2006 staging of the the 18th-century Marivaux comedy Harlequin, Refined by Love, Jolly has been fond of showy lighting designs. Over time, as he rose to national prominence — in good part thanks to a marathon 18-hour production of Shakespeare’s Henry VI, completed in 2014 — his technical ambition grew. Over-the-top lasers and oversize sets featured heavily in later productions, including Seneca’s Thyestes, which opened the Avignon Festival in 2018.Jolly’s disdain for tasteful, moody minimalism, the dominant public theatre aesthetic, “rubbed people the wrong way”, according to Stéphane Capron, who covers the performing arts for France Inter radio station. Yet it also brought in new, younger audiences: “He built a network of fans in their twenties and thirties — a genuine Jolly-mania.”Fanny Gauthier, now a close collaborator of Jolly’s and occasional assistant director, remembers Henry VI as a revelation. At the time, she was working in communications at the Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe in Paris, and was immediately drawn to the young director’s style. “There was such a generosity about this show. The actors were having so much fun, and the goal was clearly to speak to the widest audience, to bring people together around Shakespeare.”Gauthier joined his team just as Jolly’s career snowballed. Commissions from the Paris Opera and the Opéra Comique rolled in, and in January 2020 he was appointed director of Le Quai, Angers’s state-funded National Dramatic Centre. There were grumblings from some corners. “Older directors watched him with a little jealousy,” Capron says, looking amused. “In France, we don’t like success. It’s a dirty word.” The turning point, however, came when Jolly was chosen to direct a beloved French musical: Starmania, a dystopian rock opera from the 1970s. It spawned an exceptional number of hit songs, at least a dozen of which remain popular earworms. It is also exactly the type of work public theatre won’t touch with a 10-foot pole. Instead, Starmania was produced by Fimalac Entertainment, a private company, for arena-style venues.“It’s a different world — it’s Las Vegas,” Capron says. “Some of Jolly’s peers felt that he had lost his way, that he wasn’t part of the family any more.” Jolly and his team found the distinction absurd. “If you want to bring everyone to the theatre, Starmania is a way to put the cat among the pigeons,” Gauthier says. “You’re reaching a different audience, and you’re not serving them mush. Thomas really put his spin on it.”Jolly sees his own role as “being a bridge between those who don’t go to the theatre at all and those who go a lot”. Accusing a state-funded director of producing overly popular shows is counterproductive: “I receive state subsidies to create, with a mandate to speak to as many as possible,” he says, pointing to a postwar pioneer of French public theatre. “Jean Vilar said we must go to the audience. I’m actually fulfilling that mission.”Among the authors Jolly selected to write the opening ceremony’s narrative with him (about which he cannot disclose much) are the novelist Leïla Slimani and the historian Patrick Boucheron, two outspoken critics of attempts to erase France’s colonial past and of its social inequality. That puts Jolly at odds with some of President Emmanuel Macron’s own policies, although Gauthier stressed that there has been “no political interference” with artistic decisions.In some ways, Jolly may have actually been ahead of his time within French theatre. There has always been overlap here and there between France’s public and private models, but with state subsidies increasingly insufficient to cover costs, Capron says, a growing number of state venues are opening their doors to audience-friendly private ventures.Yet Jolly himself does not know if he’ll go back to his public roots after the Games. He sighs at rumours that he recently declined to take over the Odéon, a national theatre: “I didn’t! Directing the Odéon was the dream of my life,” adding that he has “nothing planned” past this summer.For now, French theatre’s showman is ready to test whether an Olympic spectacle, with hundreds of millions watching, can truly bring everyone together. “There will be no bigger audience in my life,” Jolly says. “Philosophically, it’s taken me down a rabbit hole. In [the Olympic audience], there are people I loathe and people whose lives I don’t know. It means being inclusive of the multitude.”
