“Shame must change sides”. With these words, and with her insistence on a public trial, Gisèle Pelicot became a symbol for the fight to end violence against women. This case of rape in Mazan, a small city in the south of France, revealed how ordinary men of all ages and social backgrounds were capable of committing an inhuman crime: the repeated violation of an unconscious woman.

Conceived as a performative vigil lasting 6 hours, the stage transforms into an expanded courtroom, where the judgement is reconstructed from hundreds of hours of witness statements, evidence, interviews, forensic analyses, photographic records, collages and academic texts. Milo Rau’s dramatization, written in collaboration with the stage writer and activist Servane Dècle, does not try to reconstitute the facts, but to create an architecture of listening, memory and resistance.

At a time when justice so often becomes a stage for re-victimisation, “The Pelicot Trial” restores the dignity of voice to the silenced. The audience, acting as a witness, passes through an emotional and political topography that renders visible the landscape of trauma. In the symbolic setting of the National Pantheon, this project revives art’s public function: to make us see, feel and, above all, remember.