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Is Milo Rau Really the Most Controversial Director in Theater?

“I’m a bit scandalous,” the Swiss-born stage director Milo Rau says, “but at the same time I’m very conservative. I like empathy, I like beauty.”Credit...Gael Turine for The New York Times

GHENT, Belgium — In February, Milo Rau placed classified ads in a Belgian newspaper.

He had just become artistic director of NTGent, the city’s main theater, and needed actors for his opening production: a portrait of the city based on the Ghent Altarpiece.

That altarpiece, completed in 1432, is the leading tourist attraction here and one of the most important works in the history of art. In intricate detail, it shows what seems like the entire cast of the Bible flocking to worship Jesus, in the form of a lamb.

For the play, Mr. Rau needed a modern Adam and Eve and a modern Mary. He needed a shepherd, too, preferably with a flock of sheep to bring onstage.

He also wanted some modern crusaders, and he knew who he thought fit the bill: jihadists, such as those who returned to Belgium after fighting for the Islamic State in Syria. “Do you fight for your beliefs? For God?” one ad reads. “Did you fight for IS, or another religion?” It then gave NTGent’s email.

Few noticed the ad, but two weeks later Belgium’s biggest-selling tabloid ran an article about it. Mr. Rau, 41 and barely known outside theater circles, quickly became the subject of a national — then an international — scandal. It was only two years after the Brussels terror attacks, in which 32 people died.

“I have a very broad vision of artistic freedom,” a local government official said of putting a jihadist onstage, “but here is a problem with criminal law.” An opinion piece in De Morgen, one of Belgium’s more liberal newspapers, called it “an uninspired and needlessly hurtful stunt.”

NTGent didn’t get any emails from former jihadists. It did get a lot of hate mail.

“I’ve had scandals before a premiere, but never afterward,” Mr. Rau said last month, sitting on a terrace at NTGent’s offices, taking a break from rehearsing the play, “Lam Gods” (named after the Altarpiece), ahead of its premiere. His meaning: that the controversy would disappear as soon as the play started.

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A scene from Mr. Rau’s current production, “Lam Gods,” which is based on the Ghent Altarpiece.Credit...Michiel Devijver

Jihadism would still feature, he said: The mother of an Islamic State fighter would tell the story of how she lost her son to religious extremism. She would be the play’s Mary.

“I didn’t really expect the sensitivity,” Mr. Rau added. He had apologized for the advertising gambit — sort of: “I said, ‘O.K., sorry, my respect to everyone who died, but now let’s ask why I am having this search to represent this subject onstage?’ ”

Mr. Rau’s taboo-challenging productions over the last decade led one publication to call him “the world’s most controversial director.” Born in Bern, Switzerland, he broke out in 2009 with “The Last Days of the Ceausescus,” about the trial and execution of Romania’s Communist leader and his wife; he was sued afterward by Ceausescu’s son for using the family name.

In 2015, he attracted attention for a project that included the staging of a mock criminal court in the Democratic Republic of Congo, to ask if the mining industry was complicit in massacres there. Two Congolese politicians were sacked shortly afterward.

He drew more headlines in 2016 with “Five Easy Pieces,” about Marc Dutroux, a notorious Belgian pedophile and murderer, in which the actors were children.

Despite the scandals, most of Mr. Rau’s shows are acclaimed. “It was remarkable,” Jay Wegman, senior director of N.Y.U. Skirball, said of “Five Easy Pieces.” “It’s such a horrific topic, but the way one experiences it is intensely moving.” The Skirball is putting it on in March in what will be Mr. Rau’s first New York production.

“I found myself not only moved, but also laughing out loud a lot,” Lyn Gardner wrote in The Guardian. She called the show “the very opposite of sensational.”

Mr. Rau has hardly shied away from controversy since then. “La Reprise” — in which he re-enacts the murder of a gay man in Belgium in graphic detail — was the talk of this year’s Avignon Festival.

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An image from the Belgian newspaper ad in which Mr. Rau sought former jihadists to participate in “Lam Gods.”

Yet within the theater world, it’s not Mr. Rau’s plays that are causing a stir. Instead, it’s his Ghent Manifesto, issued in May, in which he sets out how he thinks theaters should be run.

Point 1: “It’s not just about portraying the world anymore. It’s about changing it.”

Point 4 bans the performance of classics. Point 7 calls for two amateurs in every performance. (“Animals don’t count, but they are welcome,” it adds.) Point 9 says at least one production per season must be rehearsed or performed in a war zone, an attempt to bring cultural infrastructure to where it’s needed most.

Even some admirers of his plays, and fellow experimental theatermakers, have been critical. “I think it’s really old-fashioned,” Alexander Devriendt, artistic director of Ontroerend Goed, an acclaimed Belgian theater group, said in a telephone interview. “He’ll break the rules as soon as he needs to, so why have them?”

Mr. Rau’s background doesn’t immediately suggest he was destined to push boundaries. He was born in 1977; his father was a doctor, his mother a chemist. They divorced when he was young, and his mother became involved with a “quite extremist Trotskyist guy” who kept losing his job because of his views, Mr. Rau said. The family had to move repeatedly, and Mr. Rau said he changed schools “12 or 13 times.”

As a teenager, he learned Hebrew, Greek and Latin and read classical tragedies. But he moved into theater only after trying, and failing, to make movies. “My first film came to cinemas in 2002 — I was 25 — and it was a total disaster,” he said.

It was based on a story by Thomas Pynchon, the American novelist, and featured “my usual mix of violence, jokes and realism,” Mr. Rau said. “I was sure it would win all the prizes, and everybody hated it.”

Theater offered a quicker — and cheaper — way of making himself heard, although he eventually felt the need to do his own productions rather than simply work inside Europe’s main city theaters.

There has been a long-running debate about what such theaters should be, Mr. Rau said. Should they focus on popular productions and slightly edgy updates of classics? Or avant-garde pieces?

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A scene from “La Reprise,” a production by Mr. Rau about the slaying of a gay Belgian, which played at the prestigious Avignon Festival this summer.Credit...Boris Horvat/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The manifesto is his effort to end this row: “I thought, ‘O.K., how can we stop this ideological debate and really bring both together?’ You follow these rules, then you have a new city theater.”

Taking over NTGent gives him a chance to put the manifesto into practice, although it is hard to work out how serious he really is about it. “I said from the beginning these are rules I want to follow, but it’s impossible to do them all,” he said.

Mr. Rau has occasionally suffered himself for tackling difficult subjects. He once tried to stage a play about a Kosovan immigrant to Switzerland who murdered his daughter’s teacher, which led to his mother being harassed so much she had to move.

So why is he so drawn to making audiences stare down contemporary tragedies?

“I was interested forever in violence,” Mr. Rau said. “Violence itself, but also social violence, political violence, those moments when society really cracks and everything’s possible. How are humans behaving in that moment, and 10 years, 20 years later? And why do they not behave like it normally? Theater’s the one place — the public place — where you can talk about that trauma somehow.”

Controversies also bring him attention, Mr. Rau said (he admits to being an egotist), which in turn gets him money to make the plays he wants.

“O.K., I’m a bit scandalous,” he said, “but at the same time I’m very conservative. I like empathy, I like beauty, I like solidarity. I’m a big fan of old tools like catharsis.”

Stefan Bläske, a dramatist who has long worked with Mr. Rau, said that they aren’t trolling for reaction but rather research their subjects deeply. For “Five Easy Pieces,” for instance, they met Mr. Dutroux’s father and the families of his victims, among many others. They hired psychologists to make sure the children were O.K. and knew the context around the play, too. Mr. Rau has children himself.

“In everything I’ve done with him, there is dignity,” Mr. Bläske said, adding that Mr. Rau has empathy for his subjects. “That is what makes me comfortable with it, because of course we, too, have moral doubts.”

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Milo Rau’s “Five Easy Pieces,” about a serial killer, will be presented at N.Y.U. Skirball.Credit...Phile Deprez

At the “Lam Gods” rehearsal, the director’s empathy was on display. A shepherd sheared a sheep and discussed the economic challenges of his work; then two Ghent locals — a student and an interpreter — took off their clothes to become a modern, immigrant Adam and Eve.

Mr. Rau gave encouragement — “Super!” and “Voilà!,” his favorite words of approval.

At one point, Fatima Ezzarhouni, the jihadist’s mother, arrived. Her son left for Syria on his birthday, June 13, in 2013. He died this August.

She rehearsed a scene in which she shares this story, reading out the handwritten note he left behind. “To start, thank you for everything and forgive me everything,” the letter begins. “I love you the most.”

Ms. Ezzarhouni somehow delivered it calmly. “Super,” Mr. Rau said quietly when she was done, before drawing close to see if she was all right.

Not everyone was so understanding. After just two performances of “Lam Gods” — called “an instant classic” and “a serene and smart” show by Belgium’s De Standaard newspaper — Ms. Ezzarhouni withdrew from the production.

Members of the Muslim community had pressured her to drop out because the play featured nudity and simulated sex, Mr. Rau reported in a telephone interview. “I was sitting next to her, and her phone was going every 20 seconds with messages: ‘What are you doing? Are you crazy?’” he said.

An audio recording of Ms. Ezzarhouni will be used as the run continues, Mr. Rau added, with a short statement explaining her departure. “It’s a shame,” he said. “That scene was really important, like the community winning over this cliché of jihadism. And now it’s a little bit pessimistic.”

“But I suppose it is truer of where society is today,” he added. “Voilà.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section AR, Page 6 of the New York edition with the headline: This Director Is Drawn to Taboos. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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