Two voices, one obsession

On November 1 and 2 at Alte Münze, Swiss theater director Milo Rau presents his new work LA LETTRE — a piece intimate in form, radical in intention, and rooted in lived experience.

Milo Rau is one of the defining figures of contemporary European theater. His work is in demand across the continent — from the Flemish city of Ghent, where he led the NTGent theater for five years, to Vienna, where he now serves as artistic director of the Wiener Festwochen, one of the world’s leading theater festivals.

Those familiar with Rau’s work know him as a master of political and social storytelling. His major productions include Hate Radio (2011, on the Rwandan genocide), Compassion: The History of the Machine Gun (2016, on the Red Cross and colonial violence in Africa), The Rebellion: The History of Theatre (2018, on violence and homophobia), and Five Easy Pieces (2019, based on the case of Belgian serial killer Marc Dutroux), among others.

In 2018, Rau wrote his own Theatre Manifesto — ten concise points that, much like the Dogme 95 movement in cinema, called for a radical rethink of theater’s purpose. Theatre, he argued, should not only describe the world but try to change it. Everyone involved — professionals, amateurs, children, even accidental spectators — should be considered co-authors. Props should fit into a car; the stage should move from place to place. Ideally, we don’t come to see a Milo Rau production — the production comes to us.

This summer at the Avignon Festival, that idea came fully to life. Rau’s new work LA LETTRE ("The Letter"), created in collaboration with the festival, was performed on nearly twenty different stages, from Avignon’s courtyards to surrounding Provençal villages. It is this piece that will be shown at Voices Berlin.

“It’s about creating a play that’s accessible to everyone — a performance that includes all kinds of audiences,” Rau explained in an interview at the time of the premiere. “I imagined a form of stand-up that would escape the bourgeois theater contract. The play alludes to classical drama, but only in fragments — they help us speak more directly to the audience. It’s a story of double obsession.”

In form, LA LETTRE is indeed a kind of dual stand-up, or autofiction, played on an almost empty stage — just two chairs and a few props. With his characteristic delicacy, Rau avoids didactic statements about anti-bourgeois theatre. Instead, two performers — Flemish actor Arne De Tremerie and French-Cameroonian actress Olga Mouak — share deeply personal family stories that have shaped their sense of identity and their paths in theatre.

Olga’s grandmother lived in Cameroon, suffered from schizophrenia, and heard voices. She died in a domestic fire — a tragedy that Olga, born in Orléans, unconsciously connected with her own dream of playing Jeanne d’Arc. Arne’s grandmother was named Nina — after Nina Zarechnaya, the heroine of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull. Her mother, who took her own life, left behind a letter full of love for her daughter and for the theater.

We should stop there to avoid giving too much away. It’s enough to say that, as in many of his works, Milo Rau once again turns to theatre’s history and tests its limits — until, at some point, the line between theater and life disappears altogether.