My Name is Rachel Corrie
From the writings of Rachel Corrie, edited by Alan Rickman and Katharine Viner
Directed by Shannon Murphy
With Belinda Bromilow
Seymour Centre, Sydney until June 20
Tickets from $20
Visit www.seymour.usyd.edu.au/boxoffice/bite_rachel09.shtml
More than six years have past since Rachel Corrie's murder at the hands of an Israeli military bulldozer on March 16, 2003. But her legacy, like the wider struggle for a free Palestine, continues on.
Corrie was an activist with a non-violent direct action group, the International Solidarity Movement, whose activists were defending homes in Rafah, Gaza, where the Israeli military were involved in the destruction of Palestinian land and property. While defending a house, a bulldozer ran over Corrie twice despite witnesses proving she was in the line-of-sight of the driver.
My Name is Rachel Corrie is a play adapted from the writings of a 23-year-old activist leaving her small town home in Washington state, US, to make an impact on the world.
The play is an engaging and deeply political look into the thoughts of a young woman wanting to change the tragedy that has engulfed the world.
As Corrie wrote in one of her last emails to her mother: "This is not the world you and Dad wanted me to come into when you decided to have me. This is not what I meant when I was two and looked at Capitol Lake and said, 'This is the wide world and I'm coming to it'."
The play covers serious issues surrounding the Palestine struggle such as the question of the difference between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, and the use of violence by an oppressed people. But it also gives a look into the life of a young US woman in today's world.
The story takes us from Corrie's everyday hometown life, where she was politically enlightened, in modern-day US to her often fragile life living as a human shield among the population of Gaza before the Israeli "evacuation" leading up to her tragic death.
Her writing, during her time living with the people in Gaza, shows the attachment Corrie had to the local people and their struggle for justice.
When the play's lone actor, Belinda Bromilow, who plays Corrie, looks probingly into the eyes of the audience, while reciting with minimalist effect Corrie's writings, the need for action is pressed home. For activists this reinforces the need for our collective efforts, and challenges those that are yet to act on their convictions to step forward.
Corrie does not pretend to be an impartial observer of events and often exhibits signs of being out of her depth. These characteristics humanise the experience of the activist to a wider public.
As Seattle Post-Intelligencier columnist Robert L Jamieson Jr explained in a March 19, 2003 article, "Rachel Corrie put a local face on faraway suffering".
As Corrie explained in an email recited in the play, "I don't know if many of the children here have ever existed without tank-shell holes in their walls and the towers of an occupying army surveying them.
"No amount of reading, attendance at conferences, documentary viewing and word of mouth could have prepared me for the reality of the situation here. You just can't imagine it unless you see it."
For years, house demolitions have been an everyday reality for Palestinians. Sometimes the stories are so brutal it is easy to believe that Palestinians live a different reality to people in First World countries like the US.
These humanising qualities have been hard to swallow for supporters of the Israeli state around the world. The play opened amid controversy in Britain and has been causing uproar ever since.
Production houses in New York and Toronto closed their seasons after a storm of controversy. But more widely, the production has brought the Palestinian struggle into the lives of thousands of people. Many production companies have had to extend sell-out seasons of the play. This is the second year the production will grace Sydney's stage.
As the production's director, Shannon Murphy, told the May 8, 2008 Sydney Morning Herald, "I don't know how on earth this incredible woman's story could make you not want to have it told — it's actually quite disgraceful. If the arts start having censorship, where do we go?
"When I read it, I felt so passionate about making sure that, if it had not been done in Australia, that it was seen as soon as possible. I couldn't fathom why nobody else had jumped on it straight away."