Thomas Jolly loves a challenge. A decade ago, he impressed by adapting the trilogy Henry VI of Shakespeare in an 18-hour show. This Tuesday he is about to unveil a project as unexpected as it is daring, the most ambitious of his career: a new version of the cult musical starmania by Michel Berger and Luc Plamondon at the Seine Musicale.
“Facing up to such an important work, so deeply rooted in contemporary popular culture, which resonates so strongly in the collective memory -and in my own memory- was an extraordinary challenge”, he explains on the official website of starmania the 40-year-old director.
His goal: “find the fable of starmania, The narration. Having taken over the songs of the story, I carried out a reassembly work, in close collaboration with the author Luc Plamondon, to reconstruct the dramaturgy”, says Thomas Jolly in the columns of paris partystating that he wanted to rediscover the “almost punk” spirit of starmania.
This extraordinary project, to which Thomas Jolly dedicated three years of his life, and which is already acclaimed by the first critics, will make this prodigy of the theater known to the general public, who has been shaking the stage for fifteen years. years, and who has just been appointed artistic director of the ceremonies of the Olympic Games in Paris 2024.
“Beyonce and Gilles Deleuze”
Born in 1982, Thomas Jolly began acting at a very young age, at the age of nine, when he joined a children’s company run by Nathalie Barrabé in Rouen. He then studies at the National Theater School of the National Theater of Brittany, where this lover of popular culture faces a tough education.
“I came with my culture and I was faced with a reality, which is to think that one culture is more correct than another. I have always fought against it because I claim my culture as legitimate, everything simply,” he told France Inter. before adding:
“The hierarchy of cultural objects seems to me almost indecent in reality, especially in the Internet age. It is also a question of generation. When I was younger, I opened the Internet and I had Beyoncé and Gilles Deleuze on the same pages. , and it suits me very well. I think it’s great to be able to access everything like that. This hierarchy of cultural objects is very harmful.”
After years of training, where he met various theater figures such as Stanislas Nordey, Thomas Jolly founded his company, La Piccola Familia. He started making a splash in 2006 with an adaptation ofHarlequin polished by love de Marivaux, where we already find what characterizes his career: audacity, and an entertaining and iconoclastic recreation of the classics.
Because that has always been his goal: to make as many people as possible want to go to the theater, being “popular and intelligent”. “When I left school, I fell into the clouds when I realized that, despite decentralization, going to the theater was not easy. That it was still, in short, a Parisian, elitist, bourgeois, boring art, ”he lamented in the columns of the World in 2018.
The clash “Henry VI”
In 2010, Thomas Jolly tackled a big project: an adaptation of the trilogy Henry VI of Shakespeare, which was never performed in its entirety in France. The company is colossal: Henry VI It has fifteen acts, about 10,000 verses and 150 characters. He presented the first part in 2012. Then the second part in two stages, in 2013 and 2014. He performed the complete piece at the Festival In d’Avignon 2014.
The result is acclaimed by the public and the press. Thomas Jolly has won numerous awards, including the Professional Critics Association Grand Prix and the 2015 Molière for Directing. In 2015, he continued his exploration of Shakespeare’s tragedies with Richard III, which earned him the Beaumarchais-SACD award for directing. With his Shakespearean tetralogy, he becomes a name that counts.
A decade later, Thomas Jolly is still very proud of this achievement: “My great feat of arms is this tetralogy of Shakespeare, 24 hours in a row, which I staged”, he enthused – last September in the columns of the Parisian. “It was the show that shed a very strong light on my work.”
“I think spectacularly”
At the same time, this artist, eager to create a link with different audiences, who is also a teacher in several conservatories, multiplies the projects: interactive installation (R3m3 in 2015), theatrical telenovela in sixteen chapters (Heaven, Night and the Glorious Stone in 2016), comic opera (fantasy of Offenbach in 2017), TV miniseries (Theater in 2018) and musical creation (a garden of silenceabout the singer Bárbara, in 2019).
A true one-man band, Thomas Jolly sees himself more as a “troop leader”: “I am here to give coherence to the projects that the actors, the technicians and I offer to the public”, he had confided to the theater site contemporary. .net Over time, its functions have evolved. From a simple director, he became director of the Le Quai d’Angers National Dramatic Center in January 2020. Broken dry by the Covid 19 pandemic, Thomas Jolly knew how to innovate despite everything playing Romeo and Juliet on your balcony.
For now, he is thinking about the 2024 Paris Olympics. “I am very proud and honored by this team. I am also impatient,” he told the Parisian. “I want to catch up because it affects values that are mine. The issue of openness, sharing, accessibility to as many people as possible, inclusion, participation… Everything that I put into practice in my daily work. It’s just joy”. The magnitude of the project does not scare him. On the contrary: “I like the grandiose dimension of the live show. I think and work spectacularly.”
Source: BFM TV
