The Pelicot Trial (Le procès Pelicot), by Milo Rau and Servane Dècle, a co-production of the Vienna Festival and the Avignon Festival, is a work of documentary political theatre. Stripped of sensationalism, it reconstructs a court case to probe the social roots of sexual violence and to question patriarchy, shame culture, and society’s role in reproducing violence.

The production premiered at the Vienna Festival on June 18, 2025, and was later presented at the Avignon Festival, just a few kilometres from the town of Mazan, where the disturbing crimes took place.

The Pelicot Trial is based on a real court case in which 51 men were tried for the rape of Gisèle Pelicot. The performance asks how “ordinary people are capable of committing coordinated crimes,” examining patriarchy, power structures, and rape culture within a contemporary patriarchal and sexist society in which rape is routinely trivialized.

The trial itself lasted more than three months and involved 600 hours of hearings, 51 prosecutors, 38 lawyers, and some 20,000 videos and photographs recorded by Dominique Pelicot, Gisèle Pelicot’s husband, to reach a verdict on more than 200 rapes committed over the course of a decade under chemical submission. As the trial was not officially recorded, the creators of The Pelicot Trial relied on extensive journalists’ notes, personal conversations with reporters, researchers, the public prosecutor, Gisèle Pelicot’s lawyers Antoine Camus and Stéphane Babonneau, as well as feminist activists from Avignon who attended the hearings.

The aim was not a complete reconstruction of the trial, nor a reduction of its meaning to the Pelicot family alone, but an interrogation of the nature of the crime and the banality of evil. What happened to Gisèle Pelicot within her marriage is part of a much broader social narrative. Some of the men who raped her had themselves been abused as children or adolescents; many had not. Nor were they necessarily “heavy consumers of pornography.” They were “ordinary” men we encounter every day, of different ages and professions, who simply “took advantage of an opportunity.” All were deemed mentally competent—and that is what is most troubling. Sexual and sexist stereotypes, along with misogynistic rhetoric, are continuously reproduced in private life, in the media, and in courtrooms. The Pelicot trial was no exception. Even after viewing video evidence — showing Gisèle Pelicot’s husband bringing unknown men into the house and filming the rape of his drugged wife — many defendants continued to deny that they had raped her.

This is precisely why it is crucial to speak about the culture that enables such crimes.

During the trial, it became clear that most of the accused perceived women as objects. They made no distinction between sex, sexualized violence, and rape, nor between consensual sexual relations and a woman lying unconscious. Throughout the interrogations, they constantly justified and defended themselves. These are attitudes widely shared within society. Gisèle Pelicot is therefore not only a woman who was raped, but also a survivor of patriarchal violence.

Thanks to live streaming, the Belgrade (non-)BITEF “trial” — deeply unsettling and disturbing — was accessible to a broad audience, with the participation of around thirty local actors, cultural workers, and activists, including Milena Radulović, Svetlana Bojković, Vesna Trivalić, Nada Šargin, Branislav Trifunović, Miloš Timotijević, Tihomir Stanić, Nela Antonović, Nikita Milivojević, Ljiljana Bralović, among others. This hours-long examination of patriarchy and the banality of evil, combining readings of court documents and media commentary with a minimalist aesthetic, evoked the structure of an oratorio. Within the framework of theatre of the real, the stage became a space of confrontation — not only with the crime itself, but with the society that produces and tolerates it.

Rape culture, in which sexual violence is downplayed, blame is shifted onto victims, and violence is relativized, creates an environment where such acts become possible, repeatable, and unpunished. Representing real events — especially sexualized violence and trauma — inevitably raises the question of how and for whom violence is staged. Yet politically, it matters that an “ordinary” woman has become a symbol of resistance to sexual violence, and that shame has changed sides — moving from the victim to the perpetrator.