MY NAME IS RACHEL CORRIE
Royal Court

Rachel Corrie, 21, an American peace activist, died in Rajah refugee camp in Palestine in 2003 while trying to protect a house from demolition by an Israeli Defence Force bulldozer.
Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967 and has maintained a military presence ever since, despite a repeated UN Security Council Resolutions calling for withdrawal of armed forces.
Nothing in her life had prepared Rachel for the reality of the situation in Palestine and what she saw made her question her fundamental belief in the goodness of human nature.
She was amazed that there hadn’t been a bigger outcry worldwide.
The Israeli bulldozers destroy not only houses, but also wells, agricultural land and greenhouses. There are horrendous accounts of the time it takes to go through checkpoints to get to work and what the current huge Separation Wall is doing to the community, cutting off people from schools, universities, hospitals, families and fields.
Young children take it as normal that their living room walls should be full of holes from gunfire. Death is ever-present.
The text has been edited from Rachel Corrie’s journals and emails by Alan Rickman and Katharine Viner. She writes like a poet and has a nice line in humorous self-deprecation.
The script ends with an angry diatribe in which she wonders how people in other parts of the world would behave in similar circumstances.
The production benefits enormously from Rachel being played by the immensely likeable Megan Dodd. Her solo performance is a 90-minute tour de force.
The epilogue is a video recording of the 10-year-old Rachel addressing her school on world hunger. The production could also have ended on something equally pertinent and shown a photograph of Rachel screaming anti-American invective while burning an American flag at a pro-Saddam rally in Gaza.

020 7565 5000
Until 30 April