Milo Rau, the Swiss playwright who restages history with the people who lived it

Milo Rau

Photo: C.Stadler/Bwag / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	January 25, 1977 Bern, Switzerland
Occupation	Playwright and essayist
Awards	Berner Literaturpreis · Peter-Weiss-Preis · Gerty-Spies-Literaturpreis · Bolero Short-Story-Preis · Hörspielpreis der Kriegsblinden

When the Wiener Festwochen turned seventy-five this spring, its artistic director opened the anniversary edition with a show that had no script. Das beste Stück aller Zeiten, which premiered on opening night in Hall E of Vienna’s MuseumsQuartier, was a revue of the festival’s collective memory, built from a running order, amateurs and eyewitnesses, and closed with holograms of George Tabori, Luc Bondy and René Pollesch. Critics were cool. That the evening happened at all says a good deal about Milo Rau, the Swiss playwright, director and essayist who has spent two decades arguing that theatre should not merely depict reality but restage it, preferably with the people who lived through it.

Rau was born in Bern on the twenty-fifth of January, nineteen seventy-seven. His father’s Jewish family had left Germany for Switzerland shortly before the Second World War; his mother’s family, the Lareses, had Italian roots. Until he was eighteen he was called Milo Larese, then took his father’s surname because he found his own too romantic. He studied sociology, German and Romance studies in Paris, Zurich and Berlin, where his teachers included Tzvetan Todorov and Pierre Bourdieu. At twenty he travelled as a reporter to Chiapas and to Cuba, and soon afterwards began writing for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. The reporter’s habits stayed: the field trip, the interview, the transcript.

In 2007 he founded the International Institute of Political Murder, a theatre and film company set up to produce Die letzten Tage der Ceausescus, a re-enactment of the 1989 trial of Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu built from the testimony of people who had been there, including one of the soldiers who shot them. Days before the Bucharest premiere, the couple’s son-in-law forced his way into rehearsals claiming the family name as a trademark, and the show closed after two performances at the Odeon Theatre. It moved to Berlin’s Hebbel am Ufer and on to Avignon, and Rau’s script came out as a book. The pattern was set: research, re-enactment, scandal, book.

Hate Radio (2011) reconstructed the Rwandan radio station whose broadcasts fuelled the 1994 genocide; it was invited to the Berliner Theatertreffen, and its radio-play version won the Hörspielpreis der Kriegsblinden in 2014. In 2013 came The Moscow Trials, which Russian authorities raided, and The Zurich Trials, staged hearings in which real lawyers argued real cases. Two years later, in Bukavu in eastern Congo, he convened sixty victims, perpetrators, witnesses and analysts of the Second Congo War for The Congo Tribunal, a hearing on the mining industry that The Guardian called perhaps “the most ambitious political theatre ever staged.” The hearing indirectly led to two ministerial resignations.

Five Easy Pieces (2016), in which child actors play out the crimes of the Belgian murderer Marc Dutroux, sealed his reputation as a “scandal director.” Performances were cancelled or censored in Singapore and in several German cities, yet the piece became the first foreign production to receive the special jury prize of Belgium’s theatre critics and was invited to the Theatertreffen in 2017. In 2018 The New York Times asked whether he was really theatre’s most controversial director.

That year he took over NTGent in Ghent and published a ten-point “Ghent Manifesto.” Its most quoted line reads: “It’s not just about portraying the world anymore. It’s about changing it.” The manifesto appeared in Globaler Realismus, the first of the Golden Book series he edited with the Berlin publisher Verbrecher Verlag. His Ghent years produced Lam Gods, built around the Van Eyck brothers’ altarpiece; La Reprise. Histoire(s) du théâtre (I), about the homophobic murder of Ihsane Jarfi in Liège, which went to the Edinburgh International Festival in 2019; Orestes in Mosul, rehearsed and filmed in the Iraqi city; and Antigone in the Amazon (2023), made in the Brazilian state of Pará with the Landless Workers’ Movement.

The books matter as much as the productions. Rau began as a writer of prose, winning the Bolero short-story prize in 2001, and most of his stage works exist as published texts. His essays include Was tun? Kritik der postmodernen Vernunft (2013), Das geschichtliche Gefühl (2019), drawn from his 2017 poetics lectures on drama in Saarbrücken, the collection Grundsätzlich unvorbereitet (2021) and Die Rückeroberung der Zukunft (2023), published by Rowohlt. He has sat on the panel of Swiss television’s Literaturclub since 2017. Literary juries noticed: the Berner Literaturpreis in 2016, the Peter Weiss Prize in 2017, the Gerty Spies literature prize in 2020. Not every page has held up. A 2025 collection of speeches and essays, Widerstand hat keine Form, Widerstand ist die Form, was withdrawn after a Vienna court ruled against his publisher over a passage about a former Austrian party leader; Rau and Verbrecher retracted the claim and apologised.

Vienna has been his stage since July 2023. His first Festwochen, in 2024, declared a “Free Republic of Vienna” with its own constitution. In 2025 he adapted Elfriede Jelinek’s Burgtheater with his ensemble and, with the French writer Servane Dècle, built The Pelicot Trial from court reports, psychiatric assessments and testimony in the case of Gisèle Pelicot, since recording the hearings had been forbidden. It opened in Vienna on June 18, 2025, and a month later around fifty performers, Ariane Ascaride among the actresses reading Gisèle Pelicot’s words, gave it in the Cloître des Carmes at the Festival d’Avignon.

The pace has not slowed. In January he premiered Rage at Dramaten in Stockholm; in February he staged Prozess gegen Deutschland, an unscripted three-day trial at Hamburg’s Thalia Theater with a citizens’ jury of seven; in May came the anniversary Festwochen. His Vienna contract runs until 2028, and the city must put the post out to tender this autumn, deciding whether he stays five more years. The culture councillor Veronica Kaup-Hasler has said he still has her trust. Next on his calendar is opera: a new production of Alceste for the Staatsoper Stuttgart in the 2026/27 season. Whatever Vienna decides, Rau will go on putting the world on trial, then writing up the verdict.

Tags: playwrights, Milo Rau, The Pelicot Trial, Elfriede Jelinek, Five Easy Pieces, Hate Radio