Rape trial of France's feminist icon Gisèle Pelicot being retold on Vienna stage

A staged reading of selected fragments of the trial that made Frenchwoman Gisèle Pelicot, who survived nearly a decade of rapes by dozens of men, a worldwide feminist icon will premiere in Vienna on Wednesday, June 18. The staging is the latest project of Vienna Festival director Milo Rau, one of many who followed last year's mass rape trial in the southern French city of Avignon.
Unusually for such trials, the hearings were held in open court after Pelicot insisted it be held in public, a decision that meant it received international media coverage and generated fierce debate.
Rau delved into the files "in a bid to make the trial public" while detaching it from the courtroom, he told Agence France-Presse. The resulting performance is in a sense "an extension of the actions" of Gisele Pelicot, who at a key moment had refused to allow her rapists to be tried behind closed doors, he added.
'Long journey'
In The Pelicot Trial, dozens of actors read out statements made in court, as well as texts and material that illustrate the debates the case has generated. Lawyers for the Pelicot family cooperated with the production by supplying documents from the case, but French playwright Servane Decle, 28, said research for the project was still a difficult task. "It was a bit of a challenge to reconstruct the words that were spoken in court," said Decle, who researched journalists' notebooks and news reports for her script.
It was equally demanding to include voices from outside the courtroom – to get beyond the sometimes "superficial" framework of the French justice system, which "was not ready to try" more than 50 defendants in court, she said. Those voices included statements from experts and feminists.
Wednesday's premiere will start at 9:00 pm in a church in the Austrian capital, and run for up to seven hours. Admission to the staged reading is free and spectators will be able to come and go as they please.
It will be "a long journey" that seeks to "pull the threads of all the societal issues behind the trial together," said Decle. The case exposed issues ranging from marital rape to the porn industry and the role of technology, she added.
The idea behind the performance is to make it possible to experience "a collective trauma of spending a night together" and wake up in another world, said Rau, emphasising the universal and symbolic nature of the case.
'Second wave of MeToo' movement
In December, a French court sentenced Pelicot's former husband, Dominique, to 20 years in prison, a verdict that also made headlines in Austria. So did the sentences handed down to the other 50 co-defendants, all "ordinary men of all ages and from almost all walks of life," according to a text that will be read out as part of the performance.
According to actress Safira Robens, preparing for the performance was "very difficult," citing the graphic descriptions of rape, which sometimes haunted her at night. "I'm afraid of the reactions, but the subject is so important that it's worth it," she said, hailing Pelicot for having insisted it was up to rapists – not their victims – to feel ashamed. "She opened the door and triggered a second wave of #MeToo," said Decle.
A shortened version of the performance will next be staged in Avignon on 18 July. However, Gisèle Pelicot, 72, will not be there. Since the end of the trial, she has chosen to remain silent, vowing to release her memoirs next year.

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