The news that the Young Vic is reviving My Name is Rachel Corrie — a dramatisation of the young activist’s writings before her death in Gaza in 2003 — led to outrage last week. This paper reported on the Jewish community’s “fury”, the Zionist Federation promised protests outside the venue, and the Board of Deputies wrote to the Arts Council to protest against their funding for the theatre.
This is hardly surprising, given its controversial reception in 2005, but it’s regrettable that public debate about the play remains so superficial. In truth, My Name is Rachel Corrie, put together by the late actor Alan Rickman and Katharine Viner, now editor of The Guardian, is about Gaza only in the most narrow of senses — it’s about naivety and disillusionment, about youthful idealism and its first encounter with reality, about the ironies of fate and the powerlessness of individuals against the deep currents of history.
Far from the play being a piece of anti-Israel agitprop, the story it tells could be relocated to Syria, or Troubles-era Northern Ireland, or a dozen other places, and lose none of its essential identity.
Its heart is in the conflict between Rachel’s youthful idealism, and the grossly imperfect nature of the world she finds. In the performance, we circle time and again to the omnipotential dreams of her childhood — a 10-year old’s poem, a two-year old’s promise — only to clash against the reality of an adult’s limitations.
She warns the audience near the start, “I’m really new to talking about Israel-Palestine, so I don’t always know the political implications of my words”; and the lived experience of Gazan life is as a sparsely-painted backdrop, which comes to the fore only to drive her emotional arc. What snippets we do get are from a range of perspectives: a doctor who blames the Intifada, not the occupation, for violence; the Corrie parents’ worry that Rachel is being manipulated; a warning not to judge rightness or wrongness.
Perhaps this is the real reason why the play has been so controversial, not because of any details it gives about life in Gaza, but because it strips out detail, and gives only Rachel identity and agency. Activists have used the language of bias, balance and emphasis — language perhaps suitable to academic or media coverage, but inappropriate for the creative arts. A more productive line of criticism might be via the vocabulary of diversity, and representation — there’s no shortage of Western fiction about the Middle East with an absence of local voices, a focus on the emotional journey of an American woman, and a superficial portrayal of the local setting. These are good reasons to be disappointed or upset about the play, but at its failures of artistic vision rather than its political sensibilities.
Ultimately, My name is Rachel Corrie is not a work of journalism or scholarship — and for this reason it was disturbing to see the ZF and BoD trying to coercively prevent its performance. Strategically this seems questionable — aren’t we supposed to be fighting the BDS movement’s attempts to impose cultural boycotts over performers’ political views of Israel? When only five per cent of Britons under 50 sympathise more with Israel than the Palestinians, is censoring a theatre likely to be successful?
More fundamentally, we need to ask ourselves if trying to shut down a play with a disagreeable political message is a moral or proportionate thing to do. Censorship of the arts has a long and discreditable history, and it’s disturbing that, without debate, it seems now to be part of our leadership’s tool-kit. Last week this paper called the play “provocative” — wouldn’t it be better if we just refused to be provoked?
Ben Crowne lives, serially volunteers for and writes about London’s Jewish community
