Twenty years since its debut, the contentious one-woman play is revived beautifully by an almost all-Jewish creative team
In 2005, My Name is Rachel Corrie made its controversial debut at London’s Royal Court Theatre. Originally adapted by journalist Katharine Viner, now editor of The Guardian, and the late actor Alan Rickman, this powerful political play tells the true story of a 23-year-old American activist who travelled to Gaza in 2003 and was crushed to death by an Israel Defence Forces bulldozer. The uproar against it stemmed from Jews and non-Jews alike, who deemed it highly biased, bordering on antisemitic.
Following its London run, the play was due to appear Off-Broadway, but was “postponed indefinitely” by the New York Theatre Workshop. James Nicola, artistic director of the venue at the time, told Democracy Now that “a good friend, who is Jewish” had asked: “Did you know [Corrie] was member of Hamas?” Nicola had heard nothing of this unfounded allegation, but realised that the swathe of misinformation on the internet meant that they couldn’t simply host the play without having answers to these questions. Another angle of the argument perhaps comes from Corrie's involvement with the non-violent, pro-Palestinian activist group International Solidarity Movement, which – according to Joshua Hammer, who investigated Corrie's death for online magazine Mother Jones – has been cited, albeit insubstantially, as sympathising with Palestinian militants and even suicide bombers.
Now, two decades later, My Name… has been revived by an (almost) all-Jewish team willing to brave the potential backlash, comprising British-German actor Sascha Shinder, British-South African producer Gabriel Speechly and Scottish director Susan Worsfold. And it couldn't have come at a more pertinent time, with tensions relating to the Israel-Palestine conflict only heightening following the 7 October attacks in 2023.
Led by Shinder, this one-woman performance is aided only by shifts in lighting, the actor's voice and her position on a lone stool in the centre of a dark room. No backdrops, no props and no soundtrack distract from the most important part of the play: Corrie’s words. After all, it is composed, verbatim, from emails to and from her parents and friends, to-do lists and entries from diaries that she’d kept since she was 10.
In fact, most of the hour-and-a-half play recounts the activist’s life before she flew to Gaza. Shinder delivers her monologue, dressed plainly in light blue jeans, a loose white shirt and kaffiyeh (traditional Middle Eastern scarf with a chequered print). Her feet are bare and her hair is in a short messy bob that almost covers the small gold hoops hanging from her ears. As she speaks, we gain a picture of Corrie, a somewhat guileless and petulant young woman, growing up in Olympia, Washington. We discover her love of art and fighting for what she believes in; her dislike of house shares and how she can never find a pen; awkward interactions with her latest crush; and a desire to be “everything, from wandering poet to First Lady”. She is combative, not yet comfortable in her own skin, nor has she quite found her place in the world. “I didn't give a shit if I was mediocre,” she says of the moment she realised she wanted to be an artist and writer, “I didn't give a shit if I starved to death.”
Corrie’s activism starts small, within the community: helping the homeless, feeding native owls and parading the streets in the name of environmentalism. Her appetite for change, however, is insatiable, so when she receives an invitation from her friend Chris to join him in Gaza, she accepts. In the southern town of Rafah, she encounters unimaginable horrors and writes about them all in emotional, but matter of fact verse. “We must be careful with our language,” she says, noting that terminology such as “an eye for an eye” implies an equality on both sides, when what she's experiencing is a “largely unarmed people against the fourth most powerful military in the world”.
It is true that there is a bias to this play, but only in the case that it is one woman’s story. We are seeing the world the way she saw it and Shinder does a beautiful job of relaying her message. In the pre-Gaza days, Shinder shows Corrie's carefreeness by dancing on her stool, while in the darker times she whispers or shouts, portraying a severity in the narrowing and widening of her eyes. There are moments in which the delivery is so frantic, and jumps around the timeline, that it’s difficult to follow, but for one actor to hold a roomful of people's attention so intently is no mean feat and should be applauded.
Whether you’re on the side that paints Corrie as naive, foolishly putting herself in the way of an unwitting bulldozer, or the side declaring her a martyr for hope, her story deserves to be told.
By Danielle Goldstein
My Name is Rachel Corrie runs until Sunday 24 August (exc. Mondays). 7pm. £12/£13. Studio @ ZOO Southside, EH8 9ER. edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/my-name-is-rachel-corrie