Cuts straight through to your soul, immortalising the words of Rachel Corrie and what she died dreaming for
On my walk back from seeing “My Name is Rachel Corrie” something changed in me. The sound of the gutters leaking onto Edinburgh streets, and faint clinking of beer glasses from distant pubs suddenly made me feel safe, like my pocket of peace was insulated from all the outside world. Yet every memory I had of the play an hour earlier ripped this façade in two violently, the more I focused on the urban serenity of Lidl and Leith watering holes, the more it felt like I was sticking my fingers in my ear in an attempt to drown out the weight of what I’d heard.
“My Name is Rachel Corrie” is a play created by the late Alan Rickman and Katharine Viner from verbatim quotes from emails and diary extracts of the American peace activist Rachel Corrie played by Sascha Shinder. Everything Sascha says are the exact words used by Rachel.
When we first meet the ghost of Rachel Corrie, we see Sascha alone sitting crossed legged on a stool, recounting a nightmare of her red ceiling devouring her. We hear in her own words the monotony of her life in the US, of growing up, dating, and finding her feet in the world of activism. Like her we are lulled into a sense of security, peace, and ignorance. Not ignorance of news, historical facts or the general outline of what is happening in Palestine (in 2003, or now for that matter), but ignorance of what this is like personally endure.
During her life Rachel experienced a tiny portion of what life is like under colonial occupation, and it’s constant acts of barbarity. We experience an even smaller portion of this through her writing brought to life by Sascha carefully recounting every day Rachel witnessed as she journeys into Gaza to join up with an activist group in Rafah.
The play intersplices this second act with a few more memories of Rachel’s home, forcing us to face the seeming contradiction between these two lives. The descent into the hell of tanks, random shootings, checkpoints, bombings and surveillance is accompanied by an impossible hope around her, that people are still finding dignity even if in small amounts. Any fleeting moment of peace is inevitably violently punctured and the never ending tension drips slowly into the the audience.
By the time Rachel’s story reaches her end we are all forced to face the real face and recordings of Rachel, and contemplate the ghost sat before us. The play immortalises the ideas Rachel was struggling for despite some critics and politicians accusations of naivety. Her ‘naïve’ belief was that what has been done to the Palestinians for almost a century is deeply inhuman, and that we, the taxpayers and humans who do little to nothing to stop this have some amount of blame, any denial of this is cowardice.
As the sound of 10 year old Rachel’s speech from a fifth grade press conference on world hunger played, I felt tears on my cheek. In a moment of weakness I looked away from the phone playing the speech as if that would mute it and I could pretend the guilt and mission that Rachel charged us with, wasn’t deserved. Rachel’s words on stage cut straight through the moral gymnastics and rationalisations we perform to feel justified in our feelings of powerlessness and innocence. The play likewise cuts straight through any aesthetically charged view of events and merely presents us with the lived experience of Rachel until her murder. I cannot tell you exactly how it will make you feel, but only that you will not know what to do with this feeling for a while. Bury it, use it as fuel to fight with, or as ink to write with. But whatever you do, see “My Name is Rachel Corrie”.
“My Name is Rachel Corrie” is on at Zoo Southside every day (excluding the 18th) at 7pm until the 24th August. Tickets here.