The Pelicot Trial, the documentary theatre piece drawn from the case that made Gisèle Pelicot a household name across Europe, will be given once in London, on 30 November 2026, in the courtroom chamber at London County Hall.
The Young Vic will present the UK premiere of The Pelicot Trial on 30 November 2026, and it will do so outside its own building. The production, researched, written and directed by Milo Rau and Servane Dècle, is staged in The Chamber at London County Hall, the former seat of the Greater London Council whose council chamber has housed Agatha Christie’s Witness for the Prosecution since 2017. It is a real debating chamber standing in for a court, and it is difficult to think of a London room better suited to this particular evening.
The piece is documentary theatre in the strictest sense. Its text is assembled from testimonies and written accounts from the trial, from police files, from social commentary and from psychiatric reports on the 51 men prosecuted in Gisèle Pelicot’s case, and it is performed by a company of 30 actors and public figures. There is one performance and no run. The world premiere was given on 18 June 2025 as part of the Vienna Festival (Wiener Festwochen) | Free Republic of Vienna, which produced it; the London presentation is made by the Young Vic with Eleanor Lloyd Productions and Rebecca Stafford Productions, and is supported by the Olwyn Foundation for Women and Girls.
“Shame has to change sides” is the line the production takes as its own, and it is the line with which Gisèle Pelicot, in choosing to make her trial public, became a figure of resistance well beyond France. The work treats the small town of Mazan in the south of France as a sociological sample rather than an aberration: ordinary men, drawn from every social class and age group, capable of the repeated rape of an unconscious woman.
Milo Rau said: “It’s about disentangling the story from the couple Gisèle and Dominique Pelicot – turning it into a story that belongs to all of us and at the same time to none of us.” Servane Dècle said: “This is what theater is made for: gather, experience, understand, transform.”
The evening is one of four productions announced today to complete Nadia Fall’s 2026/27 season, alongside A Hunger Artist, What’s The F**king Point? and Eulogy. Booking for The Pelicot Trial opens at 10am on 7 October for Patrons+, with general booking from 11am the same morning. It plays The Chamber at London County Hall on 30 November 2026.
