“Shame must change sides”. With these words, as well as her decision to make her trial public, Gisèle Pelicot has become a symbol in the fight to end violence against women. The rape case that took place in Mazan, a small town in the south of France, reveals how ordinary men of all ages and social backgrounds are capable of committing an inhuman crime: the repeated rape of an unconscious woman.

Conceived as a performative vigil, the stage is transformed into an expanded courtroom, where the trial is reconstructed from hundreds of hours of testimonies, evidence, interviews, forensic analysis, visual records, collages and academic texts. Milo Rau’s staging, in collaboration with playwright and activist Servane Dècle, does not seek to reconstruct the facts, but to create an architecture of listening, memory and resistance.

At a time when justice is so often the scene of re-victimization, “The Pelicot Trial” restores the dignity of voice to those who have been silenced. The audience, as witnesses, traverses an emotional and political topography that makes the landscape of trauma visible. In the symbolic setting of the National Pantheon, this project gives art back its public function: to make people see, to make people feel and, above all, to make people remember.