"I'm not testifying for myself": from the courtroom to the stage, the Avignon festival revisits the Pelicot trial

Less than a year after the sensational trial of the Mazan rapes, the words of Gisèle Pelicot , her lawyers, her ex-husband, but also psychiatrists and journalists resonated on Friday in Avignon, during an evening of readings to "prolong the gesture" of this woman who has become an icon.

"I'm not testifying for myself, but for all those women who are subjected to chemical submission" : actress Ariane Ascaride is the first to lend her voice to Gisèle Pelicot on the stage of the Carmelite cloister, transformed into a courtroom where, for four hours, around fifty protagonists will relive the highlights of the three months of this extraordinary trial.

"Extending Gisèle Pelicot's gesture," who refused to allow the hearings, from September to December 2024, to take place behind closed doors, "was obvious to everyone," Swiss director Milo Rau, 48, who created this night of readings in Vienna, Austria, in June, explained to AFP.

But it was inconceivable for him not to offer a version - shorter and with French-speaking interpreters - in Avignon itself, in the middle of the theatre festival, a few hundred metres from the court where the debates took place around this 72-year-old woman who was drugged and raped for around ten years by her husband and dozens of men recruited on the Internet.

To describe this evening, Milo Rau, a regular in documentary theatre, prefers to use the term "oratorio" : "it's something that is reconstituted, it's not just archives, it's really rewritings" , but "it's also because there is an epic length".

Gisèle Pelicot "made the court a theatre, and we make the theatre a court" , underlines the director, who has worked on several occasions based on legal cases.

"There are absurd, funny, complex, horrible, violent moments," he adds, as in the description of the rape videos, which caused one of the actresses to be overcome with emotion.

"The banality of rape"

In the center of the stage, two narrators recall the facts, ask questions and punctuate the sequences which will be read from the two desks at the front of the stage by the performers seated on rows of wooden benches on either side of the stage.

Among them are several actors currently performing at the Avignon festival, such as Adama Diop, who plays one of Gisèle Pelicot's lawyers, or Philippe Torreton, who will read one of the testimonies of Dominique Pelicot, her ex-husband, who had wanted to "make her pay the price for her freedom" , ultimately sentenced to 20 years in prison.

But also members of civil society such as psychiatrist expert Laurent Layet, in his own role at the trial, or lawyer Anne Lassale and activist Camille Etienne, taking up the pleas of Gisèle Pelicot's lawyers, who will also be played by Marie-Christine Barrault and Marie Vialle.

Two court draftsmen who attended the trial are also present.

"For us, it was important to invite this kind of community of the trial," says playwright Servane Dècle who, to create the corpus of texts read on stage, worked mainly from "journalists' notes" but also from "the indictment order."

"We also have fragments of press columns and interviews," she adds, a way of also reporting on the multiple resonances that this affair has had and continues to have in civil society.

"We realized how the very framework of the trial made it impossible to access a certain complexity," she adds. Bringing it to the stage was also a way of responding to a certain "frustration," she says, of many people who attended the trial.

They wanted "we to be able to continue talking about it and continue trying to understand (...) this case which is both a perfect example of the banality of rape (...) but also a completely extraordinary case, which is not at all banal," she continues.

Because Gisèle Pelicot may have become an "icon", "the trial still remained a form of news item" , especially abroad, notes Milo Rau: whereas "the more you read the reports, the more you understand that it is unfortunately universal".