Kate Winslet will lead a cast of 30 actors and public figures in a one-night-only London staging of The Pelicot Trial at London County Hall on 30 November.
The production is a dramatisation based on the real-life trial of French survivor Gisèle Pelicot, created by Swiss director and playwright Milo Rau. It draws on police files, social commentary and psychiatric reports from the prosecution of 51 men to retell the abuse Ms Pelicot suffered over nearly a decade.
Her ex-husband, Dominique Pelicot, was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Ms Pelicot waived her right to anonymity, and has said the shame belongs to her abusers, not to her — a stance that made the trial a landmark moment in France and far beyond.
Alongside Winslet, the London cast includes Brian Cox, Lennie James, Lindsay Duncan, George MacKay, Ambika Mod, Suzy Eddie Izzard, Baroness Helena Kennedy, Tobias Menzies, John Simm and Indira Varma. Also taking part are Ellie Wilson, Misan Harriman and Harriet Wistrich, Rosie O’Donnell, Jordan Stephens, Adjoa Andoh and Julie Hesmondhalgh, Olivia Williams, Kadiff Kirwan, Sharon Duncan-Brewster, Lorraine Ashbourne and Tamzin Outhwaite, and Leo Bill, Juliet Stevenson and Samuel West.
The project was developed in collaboration with journalists and feminist organisations in France. It premiered at the Vienna Festival and has since toured Avignon, New York, Lisbon, Milan and Bergen, with a new cast assembled in each city — so the London line-up is unique to this single night.
The performance will also be livestreamed globally, extending its reach well beyond the County Hall audience. It will mark one of the final events in the Young Vic Theatre’s 2026/27 season.
The choice of venue is pointed. London County Hall, the former home of London’s county government on the South Bank, is a civic building turned events space — a fitting stage for a production built from court records rather than invented drama. Documentary theatre of this kind works by putting the trial’s own materials in front of an audience, and the casting of well-known actors alongside lawyers and campaigners blurs the line between performance and public testimony.
That format is also why the production has travelled so widely. Each city’s cast brings its own public figures to the same text, so the staging becomes a local event as well as a retelling of a French trial — and the London edition, with its mix of screen stars, stage actors and legal voices, follows that pattern.
For London audiences, the single-night format makes 30 November the only chance to see this cast in this production. The livestream means the performance will reach audiences who cannot be in the room, but the County Hall staging itself happens once.
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