It is a truism that parliamentary debates or court proceedings are always also pieces of theatre. Reality theatre groups like Rimini Protokoll and cultural critics like Jean Baudrillard have helped raise awareness, within the cultural sector at least, of the aestheticization of public and private life, and of their gradual blurring. So when the Cologne-based Swiss director, writer and theorist Milo Rau stages or restages court cases with casts including ‚real’ public figures, as he has been doing for several years, his aim is certainly not to highlight the grey areas between reality and fiction. He has other concerns: ‚as I understand it, theatre is not an information medium, and it’s not an educational medium, it’s a medium for the present or, rather, for presenting the present.’

Born in Bern in 1977, Rau came to prominence with his reenactments of political events like the fall of the Ceauşescu regime in Romania in 1989 („Die letzten Tage der Ceauşescus“, The Last Days of the Ceauşescus, 2009/10) or a broadcast on the Rwandan Radio-Télévision Libre des Mille Collines whose bizarre hate propaganda helped trigger the genocide of 1994 („Hate Radio“, 2011/12). In March 2013, this was followed by the staging of a...