‘Harlequin, Refined by Love’ Review: A French Showman’s First Steps

In three months, the French theater director Thomas Jolly will oversee the most monumental show in the world: the opening bash for the Olympic Games, set for July 26. But for now, his work is entertaining Paris audiences on a more modest scale.

At the Maison des Arts in Créteil, an eastern suburb of the city, his work is not even playing on the biggest stage. On Thursday, an audience of around 250 people filed into the playhouse’s second, smaller auditorium to watch “Harlequin, Refined by Love” (“Arlequin poli par l’amour”), Jolly’s very first stage production, created in 2006.

At the time, Jolly was a young graduate from the drama school attached to the National Theater of Brittany. “Harlequin, Refined by Love” was an unlikely choice of play for a budding director: Written in 1720 by Pierre de Marivaux, a master of romantic comedy, it taps heavily into the commedia dell’arte, a genre few current French theatermakers have explored.

Yet “Harlequin, Refined by Love” became a box-office hit, touring for four years with its initial cast, followed by frequent revivals. (In 2014, a Russian-language version even joined the repertoire of the Gogol Center, in Moscow.) In Créteil, the production’s success is easy to understand. Even with minimal sets and props, the building blocks of Jolly’s style — visually flamboyant, brightly paced yet with a touch of dark satire — are already there.

Marivaux’s compact play is built around stock comic characters. The hapless hero, Harlequin (Rémi Dessenoix), has been kidnapped by a fairy who fell for his beauty. She tries to educate him, yet Harlequin remains something of a slob — until he meets his match, the shepherdess Silvia (played with spot-on candor by Ophélie Trichard).

Falling for her suddenly “refines” his manners, as the play’s title makes clear. Love, in Marivaux’s world, is a civilizing force — much to the fairy’s fury.