Milo Rau has turned the courts into a stage. Now his moral judgment is on trial stage

MIlo Rau, once the enfant terrible of continental European theatre, is less cheerful these days. The Swiss theater director did something he said he openly hated: he canceled a guest. “Yes, we hit a wall,” he says. “But at least it made the wall visible.”

As artistic director of the Wiener Festwochen theater festival, Rao, at the end of last month, invited and then rescinded the invitation from American tech billionaire Peter Thiel. The Austrian weekly newspaper Falter described it as a complete failure.

Since taking over the Vienna Festival in 2023, Rau has transformed one of Europe’s major multi-arts festivals into a highly politicized forum for debate. Theater performances, concerts and dance still form the core of the programme. But Rau has now renamed the festival conceptually, “The Free Republic of Vienna.” At its core lies a format he invented nearly two decades ago, with his production company, the International Institute of Political Murder. Instead of staging plays or debates on the stage, Rao organizes “courts” – featuring staged hearings, real witnesses, real arguments, and symbolic judgments at the end.

The shape of the court has become Rao’s hallmark, but lately it has begun to look like a cause of perpetual problems. The theme of this year’s Vienna Festival is “Republic of the Gods.” Thiel, the German-born co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, a longtime supporter of Donald Trump’s political world and a man with a taste in apocalyptic theology and far-right ideas, seemed well suited to the topic.

Many disagreed. “I faced the threat of boycott,” says Rao. Several productions threatened to withdraw if Thiel attended. “I had to react to that as the festival director, so I canceled my commission and uninvited Thiel.”

The power of Rau’s early courts was founded in the Brechtian idea of ​​dramatic theater as a forum for critical thinking: theater, he emphasized, could provide a more structured arena for debate than talk shows or platform discussions. “Theaters are not just for art,” says Wolfgang Hubel, theater critic for Der Spiegel magazine. “In this sense, Rao is the most important political theater maker in Europe today.”

And in the 2013 Moscow trials, he brilliantly exposed the absurdity of Putinian justice by turning the show trial against Pussy Riot into itself. A feminist punk band has been sentenced to two years in prison in a Russian penal colony for performing a protest song against Vladimir Putin at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow. “It was a surreal experience to see Putin’s priests and gay activists sitting next to each other on stage. Today that would be impossible,” Rao recalls.

In 2015, the Congolese Tribunal was a difficult trial play with a political charge: a popular civil court investigating war, extraction, and the involvement of mining companies in eastern Congo. The Guardian described the Congo Tribunal as one of the most ambitious works of political theater ever conceived. The Minister of Mining and the Minister of the Interior of one of the Congolese provinces resigned after the parade.

Not everyone was convinced. Esther Slevogt, editor-in-chief of the online theater magazine Nachtkritik, described the work as “art.” Rau himself modeled his trials on the Nuremberg trials. “I found his arrogance striking,” Slevogt says today. “These are different things.” She is disturbed by the form which, in her view, blurs the line between fantasy and reality. “In times when everything is already a simulation, we don’t need any more of it.”

Of late, it seems that not only has the relationship between Rao and theater critics been strained, but also with his audiences. In Hamburg this winter, his trial against Germany at the Thalia Theater turned into a scandal in itself. Rao convened a jury that was asked to consider over three days whether the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party was unconstitutional and should be banned. But the jury included several familiar faces who can already broadcast their views regularly on television and in print, as well as former co-leader of the AfD, Frauke Petry. Instead of using the stage to focus the discussion, it seemed to amplify the noise of the content going on outside it.

Rao appears to have answered his critics by becoming more productive. While he is in the middle of his third year as festival director in Vienna, he is also trying to attend performances of The Pelicot Trial, which he developed with French dramatist Servan Deckel. The production is now on tour with dates in Bergen, Oslo and Copenhagen. He pays tribute to Giselle Bellico, who, Rao says, became a “symbol of resistance” against sexual violence committed by men. He claims that the real Bellicott came to see the show in New York and told him: “The actress plays me better than I can do myself.”

Not all French reviewers praised his reenactment. “I saw research and synthesis, but I did not see reflection,” says Anne Diatkin, theater critic for the French daily Liberation. She considered that the production was “superficial and opportunistic… and did not add anything to what we already knew from the real trial.”

However, Rao’s show trials go on and on. Debates are real, and theater gives radically different voices a coordinating framework in which no opinion is excluded. Except now for Peter Thiel, of course.

Exactly who threatened to boycott the Vienna Festival if Thiel appears remains a bit of a mystery. Did pressure from the City Council prove the turning point? Cultural politics in Vienna are dominated by the Social Democrats, and many of their more conservative voters certainly did not relish the prospect of welcoming a Trump-supporting tech billionaire to a publicly funded festival.

Rao said his advisory body, the Republic Council, supported the call and did not want to cancel it. The famous Austrian director Ruth Beckerman was included as a member of this council. However, she says she has not heard from Rao or his team since the council was established.

However, Beckerman admires Rao’s concept of the court. “Rao should have adhered to Peter Thiel’s invitation and not backed down,” she says. She wished there had been a debate where Thiel had to discuss his ideas on an equal footing with others.

The controversy overshadowed the court’s arguably more interesting performance that took place at the end of May. Compared with previous Festfusion controversies – especially the heated arguments over the war in Gaza, in which Rao happily participated – this “Court of Faith” was calmer, even though its topics were heavy in substance.

Among other topics, the jury decided that European institutions should restore what had been taken under colonial rule, that Austria should abolish the blasphemy clause from its constitution, and that theocratic rule should be rejected as an abuse of religion.

But even some participants came away unsatisfied. “The restitution court was a missed opportunity,” says Frida Fiala, an Austrian curator and art historian. “The idea of ​​a law dealing with colonial reparation was not even discussed in Austria. Neither the Rau nor the jury were properly prepared. The form of a show trial is perhaps not appropriate for this delicate and important subject.”

Rao has always excelled CrowlmacherSomeone who enjoys class. And he’s certainly enjoying the attention: he doesn’t miss opportunities to point out that 93% of tickets for last year’s edition of the festival were sold. Filling the halls is definitely part of a festival director’s job description. Although not the only one. “Rao can focus more on inviting the best productions from abroad,” Beckerman says. “This is what the Vienna Festival is missing now.”

Once this year’s Festwochen program is over, he will return again to opera: Richard Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer at the Deutsche Oper Berlin. Rau describes the Dutchman as a symbol of German guilt, and Israel as the place where this guilt seeks liberation. “I want to confront German guilt after the Holocaust,” he says.

It wouldn’t be the case for Milo Rau if it wasn’t for the scandal already waiting for him. “Raw is a phenomenon of our time,” says theater critic Esther Slevogt. “Every age has the theater it deserves.”