Rachel’s Words

by Michael Billington
Published in The Guardian
4 out of 5 stars

Political theatre takes many forms. It can be an engrossing judicial inquiry like Bloody Sunday. It can be a family saga like Wesker’s Chicken Soup With Barley. Or it can be a deeply moving personal testimony like this selection from the writings of Rachel Corrie, edited by Alan Rickman and Katharine Viner, editor of Guardian Weekend Magazine, and performed by Megan Dodds.

In the course of 90 minutes you feel you have not just had a night at the theatre: you have encountered an extraordinary woman.

Most readers will know the bare facts about Rachel Corrie: that she was a 23-year-old American who went to aid Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and in March 2003 was killed by an Israeli bulldozer. But what comes as a shock is realising that she combined an activist’s passion with an artist’s sensibility. Louis MacNeice once yearned for a poet who was “informed in economics, actively interested in politics”. Rachel Corrie emerges as just such a person.

Published by The Guardian

Two years ago Rachel Corrie, a 23-year-old American protester, was killed by an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza. Since then she has become a potent symbol for both sides of the conflict. But who was the real Rachel? Katharine Viner, who has edited her writings for a new play, on an ordinary woman with an extraordinary passion.

There is a particular entry in Rachel Corrie’s diary, probably written some time in 1999, four years before she was killed by an Israeli bulldozer in the Gaza Strip trying to prevent the demolition of Palestinian homes. She is aged 19 or 20. “Had a dream about falling, falling to my death off something dusty and smooth and crumbling like the cliffs in Utah,” she writes, “but I kept holding on, and when each foothold or handle of rock broke I reached out as I fell and grabbed a new one. I didn’t have time to think about anything – just react as if I was playing an adrenaline-filled video game. And I heard, ‘I can’t die, I can’t die,’ again and again in my head.”