If you want to know how free a society is, look at what’s happening in its theatres
‘Pieced together from diary entries and emails, it is an encounter with the present as much as the past.’ Sascha Shinder in My Name Is Rachel Corrie at the Old Red Lion theatre, London, 2024. Photograph: Courtesy of Sascha Shinder
‘A play should be an act of moral imagination,” said the late British playwright Edward Bond, who died three months ago and who, in his lifetime, spoke about theatre’s absolute right to address the most difficult issues of its day.
Perhaps a revival ought to be an act of moral imagination, too. So I found myself thinking this week while I watched a verbatim drama from 2005 at the Old Red Lion theatre in north London, amid a packed audience. My Name Is Rachel Corrie is about the 23-year-old American who travelled to the Gaza Strip in 2003 to aid Palestinians living under occupation and was killed by an Israeli bulldozer.
Co-edited by Alan Rickman and Katharine Viner, now the Guardian’s editor in chief, and pieced together from diary entries and emails, it is an encounter with the present as much as the past. It was chilling to hear her entries about tanks, dead children and the daily horrors of living in Rafah and Khan Younis – cities that we now see on the news reduced to rubble.
These are people “who are facing doom”, she says, sounding like a Cassandra as she speaks about collective punishment, the destruction of water supplies, the shooting of unarmed civilians, the need for divestment. Watching it almost two decades on from its original staging made me think about the value of political dramas from the past, especially those that are verbatim, which occupy their own distinct space: historical documents of sorts, but artistically shaped by editors.
How will we relate to Nicolas Kent’s verbatim Grenfell play, System Failure, for example, in a few generations’ time? As social history or as drama? And what does it mean to hear one American woman’s words, so specific and personal, about a conflict that has mutated over two decades into the abject violence we see unravelling in Gaza right now? It might be deemed activist by some because of its timing, or humanitarian, given that ticket sales go towards helping one Palestinian family affected by Israeli bombardment.
There is a specific difference in this iteration that has an impact on meaning: its creative team is Jewish, including producer/performer Sascha Shinder and producer/director Sophia Rosen-Fouladi, of mixed Jewish and Iranian Muslim heritage. Audiences have included Palestinians sitting with Jews.
Still, I’m told that some creatives were reluctant to get involved because they feared it might tar their reputation and make them less employable. Venues as a whole are more cautious, Rosen-Fouladi says. Times are hard, funding is short, there is more jeopardy in highly political plays like this one, it seems.
The staging of a political play is a gauge of how free a society really is, to my mind. The Belarus Free Theatre is one example, banned from performing in their homeland, but there are clampdowns on theatre and the arts in many other places facing a creep towards authoritarianism.
A few weeks after war broke out in Gaza last October, I spoke to Mustafa Sheta, general manager of the Freedom Theatre in the West Bank, about cultural figures in the area who had been placed under “administrative detention” without charge, including Bilal al-Saadi, chair of the board at the Freedom Theatre, and the circus performer Mohammed abu Sakha. Sheta was detained not long after our chat, and remains imprisoned without charge. “We are scared to talk freely but we will continue being artists,” he told me.
More widely, I wonder what Bond would make of our recent arguments on art’s purpose following the withdrawal of funding by literary sponsor Baillie Gifford. No doubt he would have thought that there was no such thing as politics-free theatre – as did George Orwell, that other godfather of political writing. “The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude,” he wrote. To think that culture can exist in its own depoliticised bubble strikes me as extraordinarily naive – a sentimentalised, romantic anachronism.
The starting point of any creative project, for Orwell, was always a sense of injustice. Political plays serve as a record of social struggle and inequity: the quick-response theatre about race during the Black Lives Matter resurgence of 2019 is one instance, the #MeToo plays after Harvey Weinstein’s conviction another. I agree with the playwright Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti, whose play, Bezhti, sparked a riot in Birmingham in 2004, when she says that theatre’s not doing its job if it doesn’t provoke: “Writing is dangerous, it is provocative,” she has reflected.
In 2006, after winning plaudits in London, My Name Is Rachel Corrie was all set to transfer to New York before the host theatre company postponed it indefinitely. It was clearly too topical, even then. But isn’t that the point of theatre – to air the most heated debates of the day, and give things a “hearing”, in Orwell’s words, just as they are happening in the world? The producers of this revival hope to get the chance to take the play to other venues, to get people discussing issues that have again become our own.
Storytelling allows us to see dualities, to empathise, and sometimes maybe even to change our minds. It is an important way to process real-life. Shinder says her father is one example: he felt the play was antisemitic when he first read it, but its meanings were transformed when he watched it. Job done.
“It’s the leaders that make war,” says Corrie. Yes, and its art that documents, unravels and mourns its human effects.
Arifa Akbar is the Guardian’s chief theatre critic