From The Seer to The Pelicot Trial, from La Lettre to Elfriede Jelinek’s mythical Burgtheater, from a (banned) book to a Guerilla Festival, from an alternative Nobel Prize Dinner to the REPUBLIC OF LOVE with over 100,000 visitors, from a global campaign for artistic freedom to a theater tour across all continents: 2025 was […]
„Art that trencends itself“: This was 2025
From The Seer to The Pelicot Trial, from La Lettre to Elfriede Jelinek’s mythical Burgtheater, from a (banned) book to a Guerilla Festival, from an alternative Nobel Prize Dinner to the REPUBLIC OF LOVE with over 100,000 visitors, from a global campaign for artistic freedom to a theater tour across all continents: 2025 was definitely a wild ride!
2025 began in early January with a “boundary-pushing” Antigone in the Amazon in Sydney and ended in Belgrade with a new version of Milo Rau’s and Servane Dècle’s “monumental” Pelicot Trial. Both plays made it onto numerous international best-of lists: “A theatrical hat-trick,” The Guardian raved about the adaptation of Sophocles’ Antigone, while Die Welt wrote about The Pelicot Trial in its Top 10: “an uncompromising confrontation with evil.”
But the absolute highlight this year was – like every spring – the VIENNA FESTIVAL, Europe’s largest crossover festival, directed by Milo Rau. 112,000 spectators attended the more than 300 events during the festival, more than a million watched online – the “hottest theater festival” last year, according to Germany’s largest Critic’s plattform. Thanks to all artists and the whole team!
Just a few weeks later, Milo Rau enchanted the Festival d’Avignon with two new productions: The Letter, a “masterful” (Le Monde) “redefinition of popular theatre” (RFI) – and the 4-hour version of Vienna Festival’s The Pelicot Trial, according to critics “a landmark in the art of theatre” (Le Monde) and “a political act of memory” (El País), which has since been restaged in Portugal, Poland, Serbia, and Sweden.
“Theater that transcends itself,” as Vogue judged after the Belgrade performance of The Pelicot Trial which opened the Guerilla Bitef Festival – in protest against the Serbian government, which had declared Milo Rau “persona non grata” and censored his work. 60,000 people saw the protest show live, in cinemas and online: „a historic event“, according to Serbian Newspaper Devnik.
The Belgrade version of The Pelicot Trial was part of the RESISTANCE NOW! campaign to protect artistic freedom in Europe. Uniting 200 leading organizations and 100 million readers, according to the European Theatre Convention, the campaign visited up to 20 countries last season.
With performances, interventions and speeches like The Rebirth of Tragedy – given on the occasion of the New York premiere of Elfriede Jelinek’s The Second Coming – or the Letter from Kyiv, published in 15 languages, the RESISTANCE NOW! campaign redefined the way cultural institutions are run – aiming to establish a new law at European level to protect and promote culture. And finally, a few interesting new publications: 11 of Milo Rau’s recent plays have just been translated into French, his manifesto The Reconquest of the Future into Italian. Also just published is a new monograph, which focuses on Rau’s artistic influences: Milo Rau, Comparative Lenses. And not to be missed: The film Ursina Lardi – Sein statt Schein, which accompanies the “radical and emphatic” (Willem Dafoe) Silver Lion Winner Ursina Lardi in her work on the play The Seer.
Thank you for your support, cooperation, friendship, enthusiasm, solidarity and critical interest! Next stop: Swedish Royal Dramatic Theatre – for the premiere of Rau’s dark satire RAGE.