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Ben Crowne

ByBen Crowne, Ben Crowne

Opinion

Is outrage the right response to a play about activism?

Ben Crowne thinks the community has got it wrong on a controversial play

August 10, 2017 13:25
Actress Megan Dodds as Rachel Corrie in a 2006 American production of the play
2 min read

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 2003led 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.