https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2026/jun/07/milo-rau-turned-tribunals-into-theatre-now-his-own-moral-judgement-is-on-trial?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

This article was published in The Guardian on June 7th 2026. For the full version please go to the link provided.

The Swiss director has staged court cases against Pussy Riot, mining companies in Congo and Gisèle Pelicot’s abusers. But after his invitation to Palantir founder Peter Thiel caused a row in Vienna, is Rau’s method eating itself?

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....