Milo Rau Cancels Peter Thiel Panel at Vienna Festival
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- Milo Rau disinvited Peter Thiel from the Wiener Festwochen after 'several productions threatened to pull out' if Thiel attended, with the Austrian weekly Falter calling the reversal a 'fiasco' and Rau conceding 'we hit a wall.'
- Ruth Beckermann, listed as a member of Rau's Council of the Republic, said she hasn't been contacted by his team since the council was established and argued Rau 'should have stuck with the invitation of Peter Thiel and not buckled.'
- The Thiel row overshadowed a quieter 'Tribunal of Faith' at the end of May, where the jury recommended returning colonial-era artifacts, abolishing Austria's blasphemy paragraph, and rejecting theocratic rule; curator Freda Fiala called the restitution segment 'a missed opportunity.'
- Rau's tribunal format has a track record of political impact: The Guardian called the 2015 Congo Tribunal one of the most ambitious pieces of political theatre ever, and a mining minister and an interior minister of a Congo province resigned after the performance.
- Nachtkritik editor Esther Slevogt criticized Rau's tribunals as 'artivism' that blurs fiction and reality, while Der Spiegel's Wolfgang Höbel called Rau 'the most important political theatre-maker in Europe today.'
- Rau is currently touring The Pelicot Trial across Bergen, Oslo, and Copenhagen; Libération critic Anne Diatkine called the production 'superficial and opportunistic,' saying Rau 'did not add anything to what we knew already from the real trial.'
Why it matters: Rau's reversal against his own stated principle of radical inclusion came under boycott pressure and was condemned by his own council member, exposing how a publicly funded festival's politics — Vienna is Social Democrat–led — can override artistic risk-taking. The Thiel flap also buried the festival's Tribunal of Faith, including a substantive push for colonial restitution in Austria that the source calls 'a missed opportunity.'
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