Camp, glam and undeniably kitsch, the opening ceremonies are, in a way, so different from the raw machismo and power of the sports themselves. And yet, as Claire Balding announced at the commencement of the BBC ’s coverage of the show, they are “nearly always the most watched part of an Olympic games.” And Paris’s show – long, winding, and frequently gravely dull – gave that vast audience a new twist.
There is a sense of one-upmanship inherent in the Olympic ceremonies, which peaked over the 2008 and 2012 games. Beijing’s curtain-raiser – considered one of the greatest theatrical spectacles ever mounted – was a $100m propaganda extravaganza. It was followed, in 2012, by a Danny Boyle-directed schmaltz-fest, Isles of Wonder , within Stratford’s Olympic stadium.
But Rio, in 2016, couldn’t match the sheer scale of these performances, and the less said about the damp squib Tokyo Olympics the better. Could Paris restore some pride to proceedings? Thomas Jolly, the actor and theatre director given the reins as Artistic Director of the ceremony, called tonight’s show an opportunity to “illustrate the richness and plurality shaped by [Paris’s] history”. The centrepiece of events was – for the first time – not a stadium associated with the games, but the magnificent Seine, the river which snakes through the French capital.
It has been noted that the word “Seine” is a near-perfect homophone for the French word “scène”, meaning, fittingly, “.