Alexis Michalik: golden boy of French theatre with a nose for a hit

Alexis Michalik has much in common with Edmond Rostand, the 19th-century dramatist who inspired his play turned film, Edmond. Both became overnight successes at the age of 29 – Rostand with Cyrano de Bergerac, still a beloved part of the French repertoire, and Michalik with his first play, Le Porteur d’histoire. Eight years, 2,000 performances and several other hits later, he is now bringing two of his plays to the UK for the first time.

In a nutshell, Michalik is as close to a golden boy as you’ll find in French playwriting, and he looks the part. He has invited me to his home, a sunny flat in a rapidly gentrifying Paris neighbourhood. It doubles as an office, he tells me, for the odd casting session. With his well-defined features and striking blue eyes, Michalik himself has the charismatic aura of a performer you’d want as your leading man. In fact, he started his career as an actor and still appears in screen roles, but writing and directing his own plays has proven more rewarding. “People have been overwhelmed with emotion after some of my plays, whereas my interpretation of a cop in a telefilm never overwhelmed anyone,” he says, half-jokingly.

Like Rostand, Michalik has made a name for himself with narrative plays that pull at the audience’s heartstrings. They often fictionalise historical characters: think Shakespeare in Love, which gave Michalik the idea for Edmond. “When I saw the film, I thought it was crazy it had never been done with a French author. Then a few years later, I reread Cyrano de Bergerac and discovered how it got to the stage,” he says. Few believed in the 1897 production, not least because the plot was convoluted. In it, the brilliantly gifted yet famously big-nosed Cyrano, in love with his cousin Roxane, lives vicariously by supplying her more handsome, less poetry-inclined suitor Christian with ardent love letters.

In the witty Edmond de Bergerac, which will be directed by Roxana Silbert at Birmingham Rep with Freddie Fox in the title role, Cyrano’s plight becomes the nerdy Rostand’s, with cameos from artistic figures including Sarah Bernhardt (played by Josie Lawrence). The play’s success in France allowed Michalik to turn it into a recently released film. On the screen, as on stage, Michalik isn’t afraid to entertain audiences – something highbrow French theatre can regard as beneath its standing. The divide between publicly subsidised venues and private ones remains stark there, and Michalik’s accessible style means that the country’s biggest public theatres, which lean towards more challenging work, have never approached him.

“The few times I applied for funding, when I was younger, it was made very clear to me that I needed to be more political, darker, less crowd-pleasing,” Michalik remembers. “But I believe in popular theatre. And I don’t want the audience to be bored.” He is relaxed about the snub. “I actually prefer the private system, because the relationships are very simple. If your production does well at the box office, it keeps going. That’s it,” he says, before adding with a shrug: “On the other side, the politics …”

Unsurprisingly, Michalik, who holds dual French and British citizenship, since his mother is British, grew up admiring theatre-makers who forged their own path, from Peter Brook to Ariane Mnouchkine. He turned down a place at France’s top acting school, Paris’s Conservatoire national supérieur d’art dramatique, preferring to learn on the job. One of his first roles, when he was 18, was as Romeo in a production of Romeo and Juliet staged by Brook’s daughter Irina, a successful director in her own right: “It was the ultimate school. Everything was oriented towards the audience.”

His career as a playwright started by accident. Le Porteur d’histoire was a late replacement for a commission that had fallen through at the festival Faits d’hiver, and Michalik was given a month to write it. “Before Le Porteur d’histoire, I didn’t believe in contemporary playwriting,” Michalik admits. “I thought everything had been written already.” He proved himself wrong: this intricate play about family mysteries, which travelled through time and space all the way back to the French revolution, championed storytelling so convincingly that it earned its young author two Molière awards.

The subsequent whirlwind led Michalik to a burnout at the time, but writing comes easily to him these days, he says. He is teetotal – we sip herbal tea as we chat – and an early-rising workaholic, with plenty of ideas on the back burner. Alongside theatre and film, his first novel, Loin, will be released in September.

In Intra Muros, coming to London’s Park theatre in April and translated into English by Michalik’s mother, Pamela Hargreaves, he ventured outside his comfort zone to explore what a theatre class might provide in a maximum security prison. It was another success. Where failure is a formative experience for most artists, Michalik appears impervious. He acknowledges his privileged position, and the confidence that comes with it: “It’s a bit like sports: the winner takes it all, from audience recognition to money.” His first British outings might just extend the winning streak.