The buzz of this year’s Avignon Festival was a play set inside a medieval convent, not far from the courthouse where six months ago Gisèle Pelicot confronted her ex-husband and dozens of men accused of raping her while she was deeply drugged.
The play had a simple name: “The Pelicot Trial.”
By the French playwright Servane Dècle and the Swiss director Milo Rau, it promised to distill into four hours the four-month trial that rocked France.
All 51 defendants in the case were found guilty, most on charges of rape. The case jolted the country into difficult questions around the pervasiveness of rape, the widespread use of pharmaceuticals to drug women and commit abuse, and the uncomfortably familiar face of rapists who are also fathers, uncles, brothers, neighbors.
The playwright, Ms. Dècle, told French radio that the work was taking up the demand by Ms. Pelicot, who had waived her right to a closed-door trial and insisted that the videos of the hundreds of rapes she suffered, all of which were filmed and cataloged by her husband, be played publicly in court, to “look rape straight in the eyes.”
As on most days of the trial, a line had formed outside the building where the stage was set, led by women looking for last-minute tickets to the show, which played one night at the festival but is being staged elsewhere. Some said they had come to witness how the director would meld the case into art, and to process their own personal stories of sexual violence. Two women near the front were in tears.
“I think men felt protected before. They let things slide,” said one woman in line, Nathalie Le Meur, a 54-year-old art therapist. “Because of this trial, they realize they could potentially end up in court.”
Also like the trial, the play drew members of a local activist group, the Amazons of Avignon, who arrived with smoke bombs whose purple clouds wafted over the crowd and a banner they had hung from the city’s medieval ramparts. The demonstrators, who attended the trial assiduously, were angry that the director and playwright had collaborated with local feminist activists, but not with them. They raised their fists and sang an old feminist anthem, “Hymn of Women.”
Security agents checked bags. Journalists who had covered the trial crowded into the building, where they found two familiar courtroom sketch artists sitting onstage, pads on their laps.
The play was the latest of many artistic and intellectual renderings of the trial to appear this year in France. The case has inspired songs, graphic novels, books and a book of philosophy, a section of which was read during the play.
But the play’s setting in Avignon, where the trial took place; its use of real testimony from the case; and its resonance with many people who attended hearings set it apart from other works.
In the convent, there was both a feeling of a cathartic reunion of people who lived through something intense together and a sickly déjà vu.
“We need to express what we lived through,” said Youssef Benzahra, the owner of a brasserie a block from the courthouse, where many trial participants and observers ate during the lunch break. Hearing about the trial secondhand, day after day, changed him profoundly, Mr. Benzahra said, adding “The patriarchal side of society must change.”
On a stage inside the former convent’s courtyard, a bare-bones version of the courtroom was set. Two women sat behind a desk in the center. They were framed on each side by a row of wooden benches, filled by some 50 men and women dressed somberly — reflecting the crushing number of people accused in the case.
Performing scenes or reflections from the courtroom, the actors stood at one of two lecterns. One of the case’s expert psychiatrists, Laurent Layet, read the diagnoses and analysis of the defendants he delivered in court months ago.
But there were several conspicuous absences from this tableau. Among them were the actual defendants, most of whom are now serving prison terms of three to 30 years. Also missing were the dozens of lawyers in their black capes and Ms. Pelicot herself, who during trial came to symbolize courage, dignity and a determination for justice for many in France and abroad.
Neither Ms. Pelicot nor her lawyers worked on the Avignon production, and three different actresses delivered lines that Ms. Pelicot had spoken in court.
“I am not doing this for me, but for all the other victims,” one of the actresses, Ariane Ascaride, read Ms. Perlicot’s words. “For all the women who wake up in the morning with no memory of the night before.”
Last week, the French government announced it would award Ms. Pelicot the Legion of Honor, the country’s top prize and recognition.
In June, the youngest of her three children, Florian, picked up Normandy’s Prix de Liberté on her mother’s behalf and announced that the monetary award of €25,000 ($29,100) would go to the victims association in Avignon that helped her during the trial.
Since the trial, Ms. Pelicot has maintained a very low profile, giving no interviews and attending no public events, in an attempt to rebuild a semblance of a normal life. She took legal action against a magazine after it published photos of her and a new companion holding hands, and the magazine settled for 40,000 euros, said one of Ms. Pelicot’s lawyers, Stéphane Babonneau. All of the money was donated to two charities working with victims, Mr. Babonneau said.
Ms. Pelicot is waiting to speak publicly until after the conclusion of an appeal of the verdict, scheduled for October, by one man found guilty at trial, Mr. Babonneau said. Seventeen convicted men originally appealed, but the others dropped their claims.
She is writing her own memoir, which is set to be released in January.
With distance and the weight of the trial’s entirety, many of Ms. Pelicot’s statements rang even more true in the quiet of the Avignon night for a host of audience members.
“The facade is solid, but inside is a field of ruins,” said Ms. Ascaride, the actress reciting Ms. Pelicot’s words. She described what it was like to discover that the person she had loved and trusted for 50 years had betrayed her so completely, and to find herself on a train traveling to a new life with just two bags and her French bulldog.
“I am not sure I will be able to really rebuild myself,” Ms. Ascaride said, repeating Ms. Pelicot’s line.
The playwright chose to highlight a handful of the convicted men, digging into their personal histories. As each of the actors portraying them took to the stage, palpable layers of conflicted emotion came over the audience.
The actress playing the wife of one of the accused repeated what she had said in court: her husband, and father of their five children, had been “a wonderful man” but he had ruined it all, she said. “I have pain and pity for you, but no more love.”
It was after 2 a.m. when the play finished, and the audience stumbled from the building tired and stunned — much like many who had attended the trial did, day after day.
Asked how she was feeling, Ms. Le Meur, the art therapist who had gotten a last-minute ticket, offered a powerful assessment — “Devastated.”
Catherine Porter is an international reporter for The Times, covering France. She is based in Paris.
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