‘It's ourselves and society on trial': playwright adapts Gisèle Pelicot case for stage

The Guardian

2 days ago

A stage play based on the trial of the men who drugged and raped Gisèle Pelicot will be staged this week in the southern city of Avignon, as France continues to debate the lessons for society from the country's biggest ever rape trial.
The three-hour performance, The Pelicot Trial: Tribute to Gisèle Pelicot, has been created by Milo Rau, the Swiss director and playwright acclaimed for his theatre interpretations of court proceedings, including the Moscow trial of the Russian punks Pussy Riot and the trial of the Romanian despot Nicolae Ceaușescu.
The play has the backing of Pelicot's lawyers and feminist groups, and Rau says he felt compelled to turn the trial into a theatre piece: 'To have done nothing would have been like not speaking of Gaza or of Ukraine, it would have been a silence that's complicit.'
The director said the Pelicot piece was about looking at rape culture, the trivialisation of rape and patriarchy in all its forms. 'Through the Pelicot trial, it's ourselves and our society on trial,' he said.
Pelicot was hailed worldwide after she waived her right to anonymity to ensure a public trial of her ex-husband, Dominique Pelicot, who drugged her unconscious and invited dozens of men on an internet forum to come to her bedroom and rape her for almost a decade from 2011 in the southern village of Mazan. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison in December and guilty verdicts were returned for all the 51 accused men.
Gisèle Pelicot, who had said in court she wanted 'all of society to be a witness' and 'shame must change sides', was this week given France's top civic honour, the Legion d'Honneur, in recognition of her determination to expose and change what she called a 'macho, patriarchal society that trivialises rape'.
Rau, who worked with the playwright Servane Dècle to create the performance, said Pelicot's decision to choose a public trial instead of holding the case behind closed doors had in effect opened up the courtroom like a theatre. 'So we thought we should perhaps now turn the theatre into a courtroom,' he said.
The performance is made up of staged readings of extracts from the trial, police files, social commentary and psychiatric reports. It looks at the 51 convicted and the question of how these men, including a nurse, a soldier, a journalist, a prison warden and delivery drivers, aged from 26 to 74, could travel to Pelicot's home to rape her. More than 50 performers will read extracts from the trial, and those on stage will include a psychiatric expert from the case and court artists who were present at the trial.
Rau said it was important to stage the theatre piece in Avignon, where the trial took place and where crowds had gathered outside the court daily to cheer Gisèle Pelicot, and where the city walls were plastered with her quotes. It will be staged in a 14th-century open-air Carmelite cloister, with seats for 500 people, as part of the city's renowned theatre festival. But, with massive local interest, Rau said it would also be livestreamed in cinemas in Avignon as well as online.
Rau said he had resolved to create the piece while he was preparing another play, La Lettre, for the Avignon festival. Having tackled other major trials on stage, he said it would have been a 'kind of absurd silence' not to also work on the Pelicot case. 'In the German-speaking world, Avignon is not famous for the theatre festival, it's famous for the Pelicot trial.'
Pelicot's lawyers approved the idea, and journalists and researchers willingly gave Rau and Dècle thousands of pages of their notebooks to piece together the trial. 'It was clear for everyone that we had to do this, particularly here in Avignon and particularly now,' he said.
The trial presented difficult topics for staged readings. 'At the start, there were many different issues – the rapists themselves, rape culture, masculinity, the family, the spaces where this took place,' Rau said. 'And then we followed the line of the trial and the questions it raised in society, in the media, and in people's minds.'
The performance looks at the cross-examination of the accused men as well as their initial questioning by police, showing their shifting awareness of what was at stake. 'We see really what culture they're coming from, the patriarchal system, fraternity and rape culture that produces this,' Rau said. 'There was a moment of growing awareness in this city, but also in this country and in civilisation as a whole, to understand human relationships and how they have developed under a regime of capitalism, a regime of internet pornography, patriarchy, and drug-induced abuse.'
The piece underlined to him how 'omnipresent' rape was in society, Rau said.
A first performance took place at the Vienna festival last month, lasting seven hours, and the play will travel to other cities including Lisbon, Belgrade and Warsaw.
Dècle, the play's co-writer, said: 'It's about pulling at all the threads with the audience to understand what is it that made these men – who were so different from one another – converge on that bedroom, share recipes for drugging women, suggest women close to them who should also be raped, and doing all of that while having apparently ordinary lives. It's very important what this says about our society today.'
The Pelicot Trial: Tribute to Gisèle Pelicot, Avignon festival, 18 July and streamed online