Milo Rau turned the courts into theaters. Now his moral judgment is on trial Theater

Milo Rau, once the worst child actor in continental Europe, is a little unhappy these days. A Swiss actress has done what she says she hates: she has banned a guest. “Yeah, we’ve hit a wall,” he says. “But it made the wall visible.”

In fact as the artistic director of the Wiener Festwochen theater festival, Rau, at the end of last month, first invited, then dismissed, the American billionaire of art. Peter Thiel. Austrian weekly Falter called it a fiasco.

Since the start of the Vienna festival in 2023, Rau has turned one of Europe’s biggest art festivals into a forum for controversial politics. Theaterconcerts and dance performances are still the core of the program. But Rau has now changed the Festwochen with ideas, such as the “Free Republic of Vienna”. At the heart of it is the brand he created almost two decades ago, with his company The International Institute for Political Murder. Instead of staging plays, or podium discussions, Rau organizes “courts” – with discussions, real witnesses, real arguments and symbolic judgments handed down at the end.

Court style has become Rau’s calling card, but it has recently begun to look like it has caused endless problems. The motto of this year’s Vienna festival is “Republic of Gods”. Thiel, the German-born co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, a long-time supporter of Donald Trump’s political agenda and a more recent theologist and right-wing thinker, seemed a good fit for the title.

Many disagreed. “I faced the threat of a strike,” says Rau. Several manufacturers threatened to quit if Thiel left. “I had to do something as a festival director, so I left my team and fired Thiel.”

The power of the first courts of Rau was established in Brechtian The idea of ​​the big stage as a forum for critical thinking: theater, he said, can provide a forum for organizing debates more than debates or discussions.. “Theatre is not reserved for art,” says Wolfgang Höbel, theater critic for Der Spiegel. “In this sense Rau is the most important political figure in Europe today.”

At the Moscow trials of 2013, he clearly exposed the stupidity of Putinist justice by turning s.as the case against Pussy Riot back to himself. A feminist group has been sentenced to two years in a Russian prison for singing anti-Vladimir Putin songs in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow. “It was interesting to see Putin’s priests and gay rights activists sitting next to each other on the platform”, recalls Rau: “Today it would not be possible.”

In 2015, the Supreme Court of the Congo was difficult, a trial and a political trial: a civil court to investigate the war, the extraction and the participation of the mining companies in the east of the Congo. The Guardian called the Court of Congo one of the most popular aspects of political theater. The Minister of Mines and the Minister of Interior in another Congo region have resigned.

Not everyone was convinced. Esther Slevogt, editor-in-chief of the online sports magazine Nachtkritik, called it “art”. Rau himself has placed his judgments in the tradition of the Nuremberg trials. “I got his arrogance,” Slevogt says today. “These are different things.” He is troubled by a form that, in his opinion, blurs the line between fiction and reality. “At a time when everything is just a guess, we don’t need more.”

Recently, not only the relationship between Rau and the critics of the theater but also with his audience seems to have deteriorated. In Hamburg this winter, the Trial Against Germany at the Thalia Stadium turned out to be nothing but a disaster. Rau assembled the judges who were asked to consider for three days whether the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party was unconstitutional and should be banned. But the jury also included many familiar figures who already express their views on television and in print, as well as the former leader of the AfD, Frauke Petry. Instead of using the theater to focus on the conflict, it seemed to expand the scope of the events surrounding it.

Rau seems to have answered his critics by doing more. In the middle of his third year as a festival director in Vienna, he is also trying to attend the events of the Pelicot Trial, which he started with the French drama Servane Dècle. The production is now underway, with dates in Bergen, Oslo and Copenhagen. It pays tribute to Gisele Pelicotwho, Rau says, has become a “symbol of resistance” to sexual violence perpetrated by men. He says that the real Pelicot came to New York to see the play and told him: “The actress plays me better than I could have done myself.”

Not all French commentators praised his reforms. “I saw the research and the synthesis, but I didn’t see the picture,” says Anne Diatkine, sports critic for the French daily Libération. He found that the production was “superior and opportunistic…

However, Rau’s mock trials run and run. The conversations are real, and the stage offers a wide range of voices in which no emotion is excluded. Except for Peter Thiel, of course.

Exactly who threatened to cancel the Vienna festival in the event of Thiel’s appearance is still a bit of a mystery. Did the pressure from the town hall ensure its end? Vienna’s traditional politics is dominated by the Social Democrats, and many of their conservative voters were not happy with the prospect of a billionaire Trump supporter being welcomed at a state-sponsored event.

Rau has said that his advisory body, the Council of the Republic, supports the request and does not want to block it. Famous Austrian filmmaker Ruth Beckermann is listed as a member of the organization. However, he says he has not heard from Rau or his group since the council was formed.

However, Beckermann admires Rau’s court decision. “Rau would still have Peter Thiel’s invitations unbound,” he says. He would have liked a debate where Thiel would have had to discuss his views with others.

The row has overshadowed a more dramatic court decision at the end of May. Compared to previous Festwochen debates – especially the fierce debates over the Gaza war in which Rau took part with gusto – this “Tribunal of Faith” was quiet, even if the topics were heavy.

Among other things, the judges decided that European institutions should return what was taken under colonial rule, that Austria it must abolish the blasphemous clause in its constitution, and that theocratic rule must be rejected as an abuse of religion.

But even some people who participated in the meeting left unsatisfied. Freda Fiala, an Austrian curator and art historian, said: “The idea of ​​the law on the restoration of colonialism in Austria was not discussed at all. Neither Rau nor the court was well prepared. The format of the exhibition is perhaps not appropriate for this difficult and important topic.”

Rau has been doing very well Krawallmachera person who enjoys a line. And he enjoys the attention: he does not refuse the opportunity to say that 93% of last year’s print tickets were sold. Filling the halls is part of the job description of a festival director. Although he is not the only one. “Rau can focus on importing the best products,” says Beckermann. “This is what the Vienna festival is missing right now.”

After this year’s Festwochen program ends, he returns to the opera: Der fliegende Holländer by Richard Wagner at the Deutsche Oper Berlin. Rau describes the Dutchman as a symbol of German guilt, and Israel as a place where guilt wants to be released. He said: “I want to fight Germany’s guilt after the Holocaust.”

It wouldn’t be Milo Rau if that didn’t sound like a waste of time. “Rau is a phenomenon of our time,” says theater critic Esther Slevogt. “Every season has the theater it deserves.”