Milo Rau: "Even I have fainted looking at my works"

BarcelonaUnlike his controversial, harsh, and violent works, Milo Rau (Bern, 1977), one of Europe's most politicized theater directors, arrives in Barcelona with a cheerful affability and hardly any sleep. He has just premiered two shows at the Avignon Festival: the comedy The letter and a national event: The Pelicot Trial, a four-hour-plus performance about the trial of Dominique Pelicot and fifty other men, which took place in Avignon—the Pelicots' village, Mazan, is 40 minutes away. Before leaving for Italy on his personal perpetual world tour, he has two works at the Grec Festival: on Sunday at the CCCB he presented the film The new gospel (The new gospel, 2020), about the exploitation of immigrants in Italy, and this Monday at the Teatre Lliure in Montjuïc shows the brutal Medea's Children, a version of the Greek tragedy about a child murderer who slaughtered her five children in 2007 in Belgium.

The Pelicot Trial It premiered at the Vienna Film Festival, which you directed, and was seven hours long. How did it go in Avignon?

— It was a great moment for the city, for me, and for the actresses; it was truly impressive. We asked the family, journalists, and lawyers if they could give us all their footage, because trials in France aren't transcribed, and they gave us everything. They made the same gesture as Gisèle Pelicot, and we were able to reconstruct everything, with witnesses, experts, and activists. Of course, with the family's consent. In Vienna, it lasted all night, and in Avignon, we cut it in half. There were a lot of people on stage; it was very beautiful. People queued for hours to get tickets, and it was broadcast online and in theaters.

Will you be touring?

— Yes, Lisbon, Warsaw, New York, we're talking to Barcelona and other cities. But it's a huge project. In each city, you have to cast, translate the script, rehearse. There are between 30 and 50 people on stage, and you only do it for one day. I've seen it five times, and each time I find a new perspective, a new line. Dominique Pelicot's defensiveness, the lawyers' verbs, the video descriptions... In Avignon, the actress who was reading it started crying; it was a truly powerful moment. It's so sad to hear all those men raping her... I've never done a play that was such an obvious political act that no actor told me they didn't want to do it. It was very moving.

Al Grec takes Medea's ChildrenWhy are you drawn to real-life, highly violent murders, such as those of Anders Breivik, Marc Dutroux, and now the infanticide Geneviève Lhermitte?

— I've always been interested in social violence, political violence, physical violence, and the representation of violence. And I'm also interested in who I am as a spectator when I watch five children being slowly murdered. We have people fainting, vomiting, leaving the room, people criticizing her: it's about the gaze. There's also a technical interest, in the way we do it. And philosophically, I'm obsessed with violence because I don't understand it. You can think that this woman was abused by her husband, that she was unbalanced, that she was alone, that she's a feminist who got rid of her family. You can say all this until you see her killing the children, until she spends ten minutes strangling her son, then you no longer understand because there's no explanation. And, finally, I think catharsis comes from that destruction of a body. I mean, there's still a Christian logic: our civilization hung a man on a cross so we understand that there is another life.

Why give voice to children?

— In Greek tragedies there is never a child speaking, it's a rule, so I was interested in doing it. Also because I saw a Oedipus the King performed by children and it was so funny when a seven-year-old said, "I slept with my mother." It made me realize how childish our way of thinking is, and I knew it, of course. Five easy pieces It was a very profound experience. Everything you do changes when a child does it. When a child says a line from Sophocles, it's extremely authentic and at the same time completely artificial.

In a world so full of violence, does violence still affect us when it occurs in a theater?

— A lot, a lot, even I've fainted myself at times. I'm very bad at watching violence, but I'm very good at staging it. Watching violence, if done well, with time, I think it can shake your existence to a very, very deep degree. I think more than sex, more than political propaganda, it shakes you to a degree you didn't know existed. There's a point at which you know you're going to die, you know it existentially, and you can only shake that point by exposing yourself to violence.

At the CCCB he presents a film, The new gospel, which portrays the exploitation of immigrants in Italian countryside. Why do you compare the situation to the story of Jesus?

— Matera asked me for a work and I thought about making a film about Jesus, because that's where Pasolini made theGospel according to Saint Matthew and Mel Gibson, The Passion of ChristI chose the actors and we took a car, and around Matera we found a million immigrants in the fields, without rights, exploited growing tomatoes and oranges, summer and winter. And I redid the cast. Cameroonian Yvan Sagnet was the hero of that movement. He was on strike against the mafia. This normally ends with your death and they don't even find the body, but he did it anyway. And I decided to take twelve sub-leaders of twelve minorities, and I realized that was Jesus' strategy. The film is a reflection of the revolutionary movement of peripheral minorities who were crushed by the Roman Empire, along with what's happening today. You can't tell the difference between the reenactment of the Bible and the documentary. Tomatoes, oranges, and apricots are still picked by hand because it's cheaper. They earned $30 a day, and half of that went to the mafia.

Did the cameras change anything?

— A movement was created, and they got landowners and migrants to work together and create their own distribution system. More than 1,000 people were regularized and receive more fair wages. The Church housed them in decent housing. The film helped unite these existing movements. We found many very cool Catholic priests there; not all of them are child abusers.

In Torre Pacheco, a town in Spain where people grow fruit and vegetables, there are street riots involving immigrants whom they accuse of not having integrated, yet who are kept in poverty. It's a systemic problem. What can be done?

— Many people think the system must fall, but I think for now we need to reform it. What they tell you is that if you don't exploit people, tomatoes will be more expensive. But that's not true: there needs to be a fairer division of money between landowners, workers, and distributors. I believe consumers have a conscience and leverage, and if they can, they will buy the fairest tomatoes. Capitalism isn't bad in itself.

Do you still trust it?

— The problem is financial capitalism, the big lobbies that use capitalism. But I don't even see any other system. What we're doing now with Yvan could be called cooperative capitalism. If consumers take control of the system, there can be a democratic transformation of capitalism. But this idea that the bourgeoisie must be killed... it didn't work and it never will. I wouldn't even know who I should kill!

Added to this is hate speech, racism, and the far right, which is growing throughout Europe. Are we witnessing a retreat from the idea of human rights and well-being in the European Union?

— The story I was told in school was that democracy would always exist and would get better all the time. But the truth is that democracy almost never exists: a few years in Greece, a few years before the war, and a few years since the fall of the Berlin Wall—and that's all in Spain.

Fifty years.

— Liberal democracy is fading. Because democracy isn't the dictatorship of the majority, but rather the sum of minorities, strong institutions, liberal values, the idea of citizenship disconnected from race. All of this is falling, and I'm not sure we can stop it. We didn't stop fascism, characters like Franco and Hitler, because people wanted it and there was some logic behind wanting it. The thing is, if you have resources, and resources are getting smaller and smaller, you try to grab what you can and try to expel and kill everyone who is dangerous because of your wealth. I can understand that. The problem is that it's not a solution. The European Union intended to disconnect democracy from the nation state because that was the birth of fascism, but it has never had real power. The states have it. I've lost hope in the European Union, and I don't see any other project to invest millions in.

Come on, it's not optimistic.

— I haven't lost hope, but we're already losing the democratic system throughout Eastern Europe: Slovakia and Austria are changing, Serbia, Russia, Belarus, Turkey... and it's moving closer to the center. In Western Europe, we still have illusions; we believe that democracy survives everything, but in the end, the power of big business prevails. Every time fascism returns, the constellation is somewhat different, the rhetoric is somewhat different, but it's the same idea: an elite takes over the state and they have effective means of influencing people. I don't see how this can be stopped. And I don't understand it, because most people just want to have a decent life and not live in war, while populist parties tell you, "We're not decent and we love war," which is exactly what nobody wants. I've never understood that mechanism. It's sad, but it's also a very old experience, and I think we'll have to go through it again.