My Name is Rachel Corrie
My Name is Rachel Corrie, Belvoir Street Downstairs, May14-June 1, 2008; ph: (61 2) 9699 3444 or www.belvoir.com.au
The controversy surrounding the staging of My Name is Rachel Corrie has been extraordinary from the start. The playbegan as what they describe as an “editing” of Corrie’s own emails and journals by Guardianjournalist Katherine Viner and English star actor Alan Rickman, then became the biggest hit London’s Royal Court Theatre has ever experienced.
The fabled New York Theater Workshop then undertook to stage the one-woman play in New York in 2006 but pulled out at the last minute, citing difficulties with “contextualisation” of the piece. Other productions in the United States have been similarly dogged by mysterious re-thinks.
And now an independent production in Sydney has been hysterically attacked in the opinion pages of no less than The Australian on the day of its opening performance under the headline “Roll up for the show trial with the Jews in the dock”.
What did Rachel Corrie do to generate such hatred and such a concentrated and determined smear campaign? She was an American girl from Oregon whose lifelong commitment to peace and international understanding finally took her to Gaza at the age of 23. There she saw for herself what was happening to the Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli military.
She wrote about what she saw, trying to convey her understanding of the truth to parents and family back home whose only other source of information about the conflict is the worldwide and extremely effective Zionist propaganda machine that is also responsible for the censorship and smears mentioned above.
In 2003, less than two months after arriving in Gaza and at a time when she had begun to realise the situation was bigger, worse and more savage than she could possibly have envisaged, Corrie was killed. She was crushed to death by an Israeli army bulldozer when she naively stood as a human shield between it and the house of a Palestinian family with whom she had been staying. (Not terrorist-concealing “brush” as the ranter in The Oz suggests: one minute’s consideration of the shattered urban terrain of Gaza will tell you that there is insufficient “brush” to conceal a squirrel in that part of the world.)
That’s the background to My Name is Rachel Corrie. It is a remarkable piece of theatre, crafted from Corrie’s own words by Viner and Rickman, directed in Sydney by Shannon Murphy and performed by Belinda Bromilow. Between them these two women have brought Rachel Corrie back to life in the best and most moving way possible: through a fine job of directing and a brilliant, sustained performance of wide-eyed idealism, childlike certainty of purpose and tragic belief in the eventual decency of fellow human beings.
At the time of Corrie’s death I thought – that’s it, now the Americans will have to look at their relationship with Israel and acknowledge that something is very wrong. But no, not only was the dreadful killing of one of its own White, cute, blonde citizens notenough to stir Washington, but it was Rachel Corrie who was demonised!
My Name is Rachel Corrie ends where it begins: with home movie footage of young Rachel, aged about nine or 10, standing up before her school, beaming, as she makes a speech that sets out her own path and exhorts her classmates to care as much as she. It is a magic, tragic scene and, in the context of the play’s construction and Bromilow’s performance, an inspiring one too.
The other creatives in this indie team also deserve mention: Andy McDowell’s unexpectedly pretty set has the detritus of a teenage bedroom morphing into the rubble of Gaza; while Matt Schubach’s lighting assists that transformation and sound designer Jeremy Silver adds to the plausibility of the whole. Altogether it’s a fine production and all involved should be proud of what they’ve achieved: terrific independent theatre.
As very little is published in Australia (or the rest of the “free” world) about what is happening in Gaza-West Bank-Israel; and as George W Bush has just reiterated where he stands in relation to Israel and the Palestinians, the only way to get honest news of the most one-sided conflict in human history is via http://electronicintifada.net/ – you can sign up for regular updates and discover what’s really going on.
