Gisèle Pelicot’s trial reaches the London stage, read by Juliet Stevenson and Rosie O’Donnell

Courtroom transcripts were never meant to be heard aloud by strangers. They are written to be filed, appealed, archived. What Milo Rau and Servane Dècle understood when they turned the case of Gisèle Pelicot into theatre is that this particular record had already been made public by the woman at its centre, and that refusing it a stage would be a second kind of silence. The Pelicot Trial is built from that record.

Now that reading is coming to London, and the Young Vic has named the first fifteen of the thirty artists and public figures who will give it voice: Adjoa Andoh, Nicole Ansari-Cox, Lorraine Ashbourne, Leo Bill, Sharon Duncan-Brewster, Alfred Enoch, Julie Hesmondhalgh, the comedian Rosie Jones, Kadiff Kirwan, the American actor and comedian Rosie O’Donnell, Tamzin Outhwaite, the musician Jordan Stephens, Juliet Stevenson, Samuel West and Olivia Williams. More names will follow in the coming weeks.

Pencil portrait of Gisèle Pelicot — Gisèle Pelicot, pencil drawing by Ann-Sophie Qvarnström. Image: W.carter / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The material is drawn entirely from the documentary record: testimony and written accounts from the trial, police files, social commentary and the psychiatric reports on the 51 men prosecuted alongside Dominique Pelicot, who drugged his then-wife for years and invited strangers to rape her while she was unconscious. The court in Avignon convicted every defendant. Gisèle Pelicot’s decision to waive her anonymity, and her phrase that “shame has to change sides”, turned a regional criminal case into an international reckoning over consent and sexual violence. The production was developed with journalists, anthropologists and local feminist organisations in France, and the Young Vic’s announcement frames the evening as a tribute to an ordinary woman who opened the way for change.

The form is the story here. Rau, the Swiss director who now runs the Vienna Festival, has long built theatre out of real events and real documents; with Dècle he hands this one to a cast that changes from city to city. After its world premiere at the Vienna Festival, the piece travelled to Avignon, the city where the trial was held, and on to New York, Lisbon, Milan and Bergen, performed by a different company each time. The perpetrators’ ordinariness, men from every class and age group in an unremarkable French town, is what the production insists on, and hearing it in familiar voices makes that ordinariness harder to keep at arm’s length.

Theatre director Milo Rau speaking into a microphone in Vienna — Milo Rau at the Vienna Festival 2025. Photo: Bernhard Holub / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The London venue carries its own irony. The Chamber at London County Hall has spent nearly a decade as the courtroom set for Agatha Christie’s Witness for the Prosecution, staged there by Eleanor Lloyd Productions and Rebecca Stafford Productions, who now co-present this evening with the Young Vic. A room built for a fictional verdict will, for one night, hold a real one. The UK presentation is supported by the Olwyn Foundation for Women and Girls.

The one-off performance runs for four hours on Monday 30 November 2026, from 6pm to 10pm. Tickets go on general sale on Wednesday 7 October. For those who cannot be in the room, the Young Vic will live-stream the full performance worldwide, free of charge, on its YouTube channel. The text, research and direction are by Milo Rau and Servane Dècle, with production dramaturgy by Nastasia Griese.

Tags: Juliet Stevenson, Rosie O'Donnell, Adjoa Andoh, documentary theatre, Gisèle Pelicot, London County Hall