Theatre has always been a space where politics and personal stories collide, and few plays embody that more starkly than My Name is Rachel Corrie. First staged in 2005 and based on the diaries and emails of the young American activist killed in Gaza in 2003, the piece is revived at Zoo Southside for this year’s Fringe.In today’s world, where the crisis in Gaza is described by large numbers of scholars and politicians as genocide and dominates news cycles while global suffering is laid bare in real time, Rachel Corrie’s story takes on a renewed urgency and yet, paradoxically, also feels strangely distant.
The production offers an intimate portrait of Rachel: funny, thoughtful, and deeply committed to justice. Her words reveal a young woman navigating ordinary concerns of student life alongside extraordinary conviction to stand up against oppression. Performed with sensitivity and conviction, the show doesn’t sensationalise her death but instead allows her voice to guide us through the waves of passion and doubt that defined her brief life. The actor Sascha Shinder gives an immaculate performance, with her closing lines in particular giving me goosebumps.
Yet, while the text is undeniably moving, the play’s framing shows its age. Corrie’s observations are anchored in an early 2000s context, before social media, before today’s constant livestreaming of atrocity, and before the scale of devastation we now witness daily. The result is that, while audiences can draw obvious parallels to today’s headlines, the piece risks feeling like a time capsule rather than a fully contemporary engagement. It reminds us of the long, unbroken thread of violence and displacement in Palestine, but stops short of addressing the enormity of the present moment.
Still, My Name is Rachel Corrie retains immense value as a human story. The production is as simple as it gets, one woman sitting on a stool reciting her thoughts and intense feelings. But it reminds us that behind every headline are individuals whose empathy compels them to act. For younger audiences, it may also serve as an introduction to the roots of a conflict that now dominates global politics.
In an Edinburgh Fringe filled with urgent political work, this revival doesn’t always land with the immediacy that this global issue now demands. But as an act of witness and as a reminder of one young woman’s unshakeable belief in humanity, it remains a very important, if somewhat dated, piece of theatre.
