Milo Rau, once the enfant terrible of continental European theatre, is a little less buoyant these days. The Swiss theatre-maker has done something he says he explicitly hates: he has cancelled a guest. “Yes, we hit a wall,” he says. “But at least it made the wall visible.”
In his capacity as the artistic director of the Wiener Festwochen theatre festival, Rau, at the end of last month, first invited, then disinvited, the American tech billionaire Peter Thiel. The Austrian weekly Falter called it a fiasco.
Since taking over the Vienna festival in 2023, Rau has turned one of Europe’s major multi-arts festivals into a highly politicised forum for debate. Theatre, concerts and dance performances still form the core of the programme. But Rau has now rebranded the Festwochen with a conceptual framework, as the “Free Republic of Vienna”. At its core sits a format he invented almost two decades ago, with his production company The International Institute for Political Murder. Rather than putting on plays, or podium discussions, Rau organises “tribunals” – featuring staged hearings, real witnesses, real arguments and symbolic judgments handed down at the end.
The tribunal format became Rau’s calling card, but more recently it has started to look like the cause of perennial trouble. The motto of this year’s Vienna festival is “Republic of Gods”. Thiel, the German-born co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, a longstanding supporter of Donald Trump’s political universe and a man with a taste for apocalyptic theology and far-right ideas, looked a perfect fit for the theme.
Many disagreed. “I was faced with the threat of boycotts,” Rau says. Several productions threatened to pull out if Thiel were to attend. “I had to react to that as festival director, so I cancelled my own panel and disinvited Thiel.”
The power of Rau’s early tribunals was founded in the Brechtian idea of the dramatic stage as a forum for critical thinking: theatre, it asserted, can provide a more structured arena for debate than talkshows or podium discussions. “Theatres are not only reserved for art”, says Wolfgang Höbel, theatre critic of Der Spiegel. “In that sense Rau is the most important political theatre-maker in Europe today.”
At the 2013 Moscow Trials, he brilliantly exposed the absurdity of Putinist justice by turning the show trial against Pussy Riot back on itself. The feminist punk collective had been sentenced to two years in a Russian penal colony for performing a protest song against Vladimir Putin in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. “It was a surreal experience to see Putin’s priests and gay activists sit next to each other on stage”, remembers Rau: “Today this would be impossible.”
In 2015, the Congo Tribunal was rough, experimental theatre with a political charge: a grassroots civil court investigating war, extraction and the involvement of mining companies in eastern Congo. The Guardian called the Congo Tribunal one of the most ambitious pieces of political theatre ever. A mining minister and an interior minister of one of the Congo provinces resigned after the performance.
Not everyone was convinced. Esther Slevogt, editor in chief of the online theatre magazine Nachtkritik, called it “artivism”. Rau himself has placed his tribunals in the tradition of the Nuremberg trials. “I found his arrogance striking”, says Slevogt today. “These are different things.” She is troubled by a format that, in her view, blurs the line between fiction and reality. “In times when everything is already simulation, we don’t need more of it.”
Recently, not just the relationship between Rau and theatre critics but also with his audiences seems to have soured. In Hamburg this winter, his Trial Against Germany at the Thalia theatre became a scandal in its own right. Rau had assembled a jury that was asked to consider over three days whether the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party was unconstitutional and should be banned. But the jury included many familiar faces who already get to regularly air their views on television and in print, as well as a former co-leader of the AfD, Frauke Petry. Rather than using the theatre to concentrate debate, it seemed to amplify the hubbub of content swirling around outside it.
Rau seems to have answered his critics by becoming even more productive. While 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 the French dramaturg Servane Dècle. The production is now touring, with dates in Bergen, Oslo and Copenhagen. It pays tribute to Gisèle Pelicot, who, Rau says, has become “an icon of resistance” against sexual violence committed by men. He claims that the real Pelicot came to see the performance in New York and told him: “The actress plays me better than I could do it myself.”
Not all French reviewers have applauded his re-enactment. “I saw the research and the synthesis, but I did not see a reflection,” says Anne Diatkine, a theatre critic for the French daily Libération. She found the production “superficial and opportunistic … He did not add anything to what we knew already from the real trial.”
Still, Rau’s mock trials run and run. The debates are real, and the stage gives radically different voices a curated setting in which no opinion is excluded. Except now Peter Thiel’s, of course.
Exactly who threatened to boycott the Vienna festival in the event of a Thiel appearance remains a slight mystery. Did pressure from the town hall prove the tipping point? Vienna’s cultural politics are dominated by the Social Democrats, and many of their more conservative voters certainly did not relish the prospect of a Trump-supporting tech billionaire being welcomed at a publicly funded festival.
Rau has said that his advisory body, the Council of the Republic, supported the invitation and did not want to cancel it. The acclaimed Austrian film-maker Ruth Beckermann is listed as a member of that council. Yet she says she has not heard from Rau or his team since the council was established.
Still, Beckermann admires Rau’s tribunal concept. “Rau should have stuck with the invitation of Peter Thiel and not buckled,” she says. She would have liked a debate in which Thiel had to discuss his ideas on equal terms with others.
The row has overshadowed an arguably more interesting tribunal performance that took place at the end of May. Compared with previous Festwochen controversies – not least the heated arguments over the war in Gaza in which Rau happily took part – this “Tribunal of Faith” was quieter, even though its themes were heavy in substance.
Among other subjects, the jury decided that European institutions should return what was taken under colonial rule, that Austria should abolish the blasphemy paragraph from its constitution, and that theocratic rule should be rejected as an abuse of religion.
But even some participants came away dissatisfied. “The tribunal about restitution was a missed opportunity,” says Freda Fiala, an Austrian curator and art historian. “The idea for a law dealing with colonial restitution in Austria was not even discussed. Neither Rau nor the jury were properly prepared. A show trial format is probably not suitable for this sensitive and important topic.”
Rau has always excelled as Krawallmacher, someone who enjoys a row. And he certainly enjoys attention: he does not decline opportunities to point out that 93% of tickets for last year’s edition of the festival were sold. Filling the halls is certainly part of the job description of a festival director. Although not the only one. “Rau could focus more on inviting the best productions from abroad,” Beckermann says. “That is what the Vienna festival is missing right now.”
Once this year’s Festwochen programme is over, he will turn again to opera: Richard Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer at the Deutsche Oper Berlin. Rau describes the Dutchman as a figure of German guilt, and Israel as the place where that guilt seeks release. “I want to confront German guilt after the Holocaust,” he says.
It would not be Milo Rau if that did not already sound like a scandal in waiting. “Rau is a phenomenon of our time,” says theatre critic Esther Slevogt. “Every era has the theatre it deserves.”