It was a case that shook France. Last December, the husband of Gisèle Pelicot was convicted of drugging and assaulting her for over a decade, and for inviting dozens of men to rape her while she was unconscious.
Now, just six months later, the trial has already inspired a work of theater — in Vienna, as part of the city’s prestigious Festwochen festival. On Wednesday, the Swiss director Milo Rau, who has led the event since 2023, and the French dramaturg Servane Dècle presented “The Pelicot Trial,” a seven-hour reading of excerpts from the French legal proceedings and of interviews and commentary related to the case.
It was a long night at the Church of St. Elisabeth, a red brick Roman Catholic church in a southern district of Vienna. The sun was setting when the audience went in at 9 p.m., filling the pews to capacity. When the final words were spoken, at around 4:15 a.m., sunrise was near, and only around 30 people remained.
In a joint interview before the performance, Rau and Dècle said the wide range of material involved, with sections delving into history, philosophy and biology, was intended to dispel any notion that Pelicot’s story was an isolated event. “It’s an example of patriarchal violence,” Rau said. “The more we dive into it, the more we see that it’s the tip of the iceberg.”
Rau has a long history of bringing trials to the stage. In “The Last Days of the Ceausescus,” Rau reenacted the 1989 legal proceedings against the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife. In “The Congo Tribunal” and “The Moscow Trials,” he created mock criminal courts to analyze real political events.
Yet with the Pelicot case, he said, he knew that it was too soon to turn the case into a fully staged play. “There’s a rule that normally you need 25 years of distance, one generation, for the symbolic value of the case to become clearer,” Rau said. Dècle, a dramaturg who has worked with the director on several projects over the past decade, also had concerns about “showing the trial without distance,” she said.
A reading was a way to analyze the events without casting an actor as Pelicot or any of the other trial participants. In Vienna, Rau and Dècle enlisted 30 performers, men and women of various ages, to take part. Two of them, Mavie Hörbiger and Safira Robens, sat at a table set up near the church’s altar and introduced each “fragment” of text, as they are described throughout.
The other performers took turns reading the fragments from a small pulpit. The words were gathered, Rau and Dècle said, through extensive research — there is no written transcript of court cases in the French justice system. They called instead on researchers, lawyers and journalists who had attended the trial, who gave them thousands of pages of notes.
Because of this work, “The Pelicot Trial” features statements made by Pelicot (who had asked for an open trial), her husband and the other men convicted during the trial; remarks from lawyers, psychiatric experts and other witnesses; comments from activists and journalists; and excerpts from newspaper opinion pieces and interviews. The proceedings were live-streamed on YouTube by the festival but weren’t made available for later viewing.
Inside the Church of St. Elisabeth, the atmosphere was solemn throughout. On the uncomfortable wooden benches, some audience members shook their heads or hunched over, as if weighed down by what they were hearing. Extended fragments delved into the testimonies of some of the accused men, their background and lines of defense. Others provided deep dives into the history of pornography or chemical subjugation, sometimes with a level of detail that would have been easier to digest at another time of the day.
A handful of people stood up and left during the most harrowing moments, including Pelicot’s first court statement. While the actors had been directed by Rau and Dècle not to “act,” Dorothee Hartinger, tasked with delivering Pelicot’s words, pursed her lips before she started, looking visibly tense and moved.
The idea for “The Pelicot Trial” came to Rau while the real trial was taking place. He was in France at the time to rehearse a production, “The Letter,” that will premiere next month at the Avignon Festival, one of Europe’s largest theater events, held in southern France. Avignon is also the city where the case was being heard.
Rau called Tiago Rodrigues, the Avignon Festival’s director, and asked whether he would be interested in a performance looking back on the event.
“He was very happy because he said that it was strange for him to have nothing that is directly connected to the trial at the festival,” Rau said.
On July 18, “The Pelicot Trial” will be repeated at the Avignon Festival with French performers and a shorter running time of three to four hours. (Rau said there were “organizational reasons” for the cuts but added that the French audience needed less contextual information about the case.) Further stagings are in the works for Lisbon, New York and Berlin, according to Rau.
In Vienna, “The Pelicot Trial” often felt monotonous. There was plenty of time to contemplate the unlikely surroundings for this recreation of a rape trial: the tall, yet fairly plain walls of the 19th-century church, the chipped wooden pews peppered with copies of the “Gotteslob,” a German-language hymnbook.
Yet this setting also allowed the text to resonate — literally, since the words echoed in the space. And with little overt emotion from the performers, “The Pelicot Trial” drew attention instead to the structure of the arguments. In some sections, as when some men denied that they had raped Pelicot, their evasive answers drew hollow laughter from the audience.
As the hours passed, the stories about individuals slowly cohered into a larger one about the “banality of evil,” a phrase coined by the philosopher Hannah Arendt and quoted by one of Pelicot’s lawyers. For a reading, it was no easy feat, though it came with a sense of despair. If only more people had been around to witness it at 4 a.m.
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