crime

The best theatre to stream this month: the Gisèle Pelicot trial becomes an all-star play that ‘just floors you’

The best theatre to stream this month: the Gisèle Pelicot trial becomes an all-star play that ‘just floors you’

An unmissable documentary play, Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia with luminous Isis Hainsworth and ecstatic dance in a Norwegian museum are among November’s highlights Swiss director Milo Rau’s ripped-from-the-headlines approach to theatre has included shows about wars in Iraq and Congo and the exploitation of migrant workers. His four-hour documentary play (created with Servane Dècle) about the trial of the men who drugged and raped Gisèle Pelicot has been performed around the world and will be staged by the Young Vic at London’s County Hall on 30 November.

An unmissable documentary play, Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia with luminous Isis Hainsworth and ecstatic dance in a Norwegian museum are among November’s highlights

Swiss director Milo Rau’s ripped-from-the-headlines approach to theatre has included shows about wars in Iraq and Congo and the exploitation of migrant workers. His four-hour documentary play (created with Servane Dècle) about the trial of the men who drugged and raped Gisèle Pelicot has been performed around the world and will be staged by the Young Vic at London’s County Hall on 30 November. The production swiftly sold out but will be livestreamed in full. The cast includes Adjoa Andoh, Rosie Jones and Olivia Williams. “It was the act of witnessing that really got me,” said Young Vic boss Nadia Fall of the show. “It isn’t scenes and costumes in a set like a traditional piece of theatre. It is the facts. It just floors you.”

It’s already one of Europe’s coolest theatre companies, an avant garde hit factory that stormed the West End with The Years and Oedipus. Now, Internationaal Theater Amsterdam has launched its own record label to release the “most requested” music from its recent productions. The first compilation includes tracks by Thijs van Vuure from an adaptation of James Baldwin’s novel Giovanni’s Room. Available on Spotify.

The moving mosaic of schoolboys he painstakingly choreographed for the viral Storm video has brought Damien Jalet on to the smartphones of a huge new audience. On Sadler’s Wells Digital Stage, you can now see the great innovator twisting scenes of ecstasy and agony with performers among the statues of Oslo’s Vigeland Museum, in the hour-long film DuEls (made with Erna Ómarsdóttir). Highlights include a tangled trio familiar from horror hit Suspiria. Endlessly intriguing, not least in how the movement changes your appreciation of figures frozen in time: a choreographer illuminating sculptors.

When director Carrie Cracknell was cast in a student production of Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing, she considered herself “no match for his dazzling dialogue, speed of thought or emotional depths”. But Cracknell mastered all of that, and much more, in her Old Vic revival of the chewy Arcadia, which traverses two different centuries to explore matters of the universe and the heart, with a first-rate cast including the luminous, Olivier-nominated Isis Hainsworth. If only all plays left you with quite so much to think about. On NT at Home from 26 November.

In 2017, the performance artist Selina Thompson arrived at the Edinburgh fringe with a mallet, protective goggles and blocks of salt rock that she duly hammered in a one-woman show whose audience members each took home a piece. Thompson left Edinburgh that year with several awards for her extraordinary account of the transatlantic slave triangle and how she retraced its route, from the UK to Ghana to Jamaica. The performance inspired this film on BBC iPlayer, which preserves its sense of ritual, commemoration and intimacy – and adds Thompson’s reflections on its creation.

  • theatre
  • play
  • pelicot
  • trial
  • month
  • gisèle
  • documentary
  • november

Summaries and tags are generated automatically. Stay informed with VidiaNews.

Related news

Russell Brand trial: accusers have ‘nothing to gain’ and were not led by media, court told
crime

Russell Brand trial: accusers have ‘nothing to gain’ and were not led by media, court told

In closing speech, prosecutor says six women had ‘bravely’ come forward after realising they were not alone Six women who have been “haunted” by their encounters with Russell Brand came forward to give evidence against him with nothing to gain and no appetite for fame, a court has heard. The prosecutor, Riel Karmy-Jones KC, said the women, who do not know one another, had not been compelled to make police complaints by the “magic force” of media reporting on Brand’s alleged misconduct.

Read →
UK police should not have let US force take over airbase trial, MoD documents show
crime

UK police should not have let US force take over airbase trial, MoD documents show

According to documents obtained by the Guardian, officials accused Cambridgeshire force of breaching US-UK deal by handing over case of woman strangled by US pilot Ministry of Defence officials have privately accused a UK police force of wrongly handing over the investigation of an American fighter pilot who strangled a British woman to the US military, according to documents obtained by the Guardian. Cambridgeshire police allowed the US military police to quickly take control of the investigation into Capt Jacob Wulfson after he had been accused of sexually assaulting Sarah Steele in his Camb

Read →
Jump scares, leather gloves and squeaking moth noises: theatre horror masters on how they make their shows so scary
lifestyle

Jump scares, leather gloves and squeaking moth noises: theatre horror masters on how they make their shows so scary

Whether it’s immersive chiller Blackout or the campily scary 2:22: A Ghost Story, ‘tis the season to be scared witless at the theatre. “It’s the Jaws effect,” says Chris Fisher, the illusions designer behind the stage show of Paranormal Activity (at London Ambassador’s theatre to 27 February, and touring the UK), which had me sheepishly checking under my bed for several nights and stopped just short of nightmares.

Read →
Mexican Grand Prix qualifying: Formula One 2026 – live
general

Mexican Grand Prix qualifying: Formula One 2026 – live

️ F1 updates from 9pm GMT in Mexico City ️ Giles Richards’ race scene-setter | And mail Philip After last week’s rehearsal in Austin, Kimi Antonelli is going to become world champion this weekend provided he reaches the chequered flag on Sunday. Even as the opposition caught and at times surpassed Mercedes, Antonelli was able to deliver when a win was not on the table.

Read →