Taking sides: Palestinian advocacy and metropolitan theatre

Abstract

The political and documentary turn in Anglophone metropolitan theatre in the new millennium has generated a number of plays that address the question of Palestine. Israel/Palestine presents itself as a site in which fundamental social change is still possible, making it an especially productive setting for political theatre. This article focuses on two of the most high-profile plays of the last ten years: Alan Rickman and Katharine Viner’s My Name is Rachel Corrie (2005) and Caryl Churchill’s Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza (2009). It examines not only the controversies that each of these plays engendered, but also the ways in which they negotiate the tensions that are inherent in the very notion of advocacy in theatre, which connotes two distinct forms of address: on the one hand, the effort to generate empathy and humanitarian feeling without specifying a political commitment; on the other, the attempt to persuade a viewer to affiliate with a particular struggle or set of beliefs, and to commit herself or himself to action. The article thus seeks to bring together three areas of enquiry that have been marginalized in postcolonial studies: the question of Palestine, theatre and the role of cultural production in political movements.

Keywords:

• political theatre
• cultural activism
• My Name is Rachel Corrie
• Seven Jewish Children
• Caryl Churchill

Notes

1. For a detailed account of the opposition to Mer Khamis and the Freedom Theatre in the Jenin camp, as well as Zubeidi’s role in the theatre, see Shatz (2013). For a discussion of the work of other radical theatres in the West Bank – Al-Rowwad in Aida camp in Bethlehem, ASHTAR Theatre in Ramallah and Inad Theatre in Beit Jala – see Wickstrom (2012, 31–87).

2. Philo and Berry’s More Bad News From Israel (2011) remains the most comprehensive source on the effects that Zionist hasbara campaigning has on anglophone media representation and public reception of the conflict. On the “Israel lobby” in the US, see Mearsheimer and Walt (2008).

3. The sense of diminished political possibility in the Anglophone metropole has arguably been alleviated by the mass social protests of the Occupy movement in 2011 and 2012. This movement has also produced its own theatre: for examples, see the verbatim plays Demos (Price 2012) and No Room for Wishing (Bryck 2012), which feature testimony from members of the Occupy movement in the UK and the US respectively.

4. For a fuller list of recent metropolitan productions about the conflict, see Gener (2008) and Kritzer (2010).

5. Most notable, perhaps, are the productions in the region, which would evidently elicit different forms of affiliation and empathy. My Name is Rachel Corrie toured Israel and the West Bank in an Arabic-language production in 2008 (McCarthy 2008) and was staged in Hebrew at Jerusalem’s Khan Theatre in 2013 (Rubin 2013). Seven Jewish Children was performed in Hebrew in Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square in 2009 (Shabi 2009) and in English at the Lebanese American University in Beirut in 2009 (Salame 2009).

6. The New York Theater Workshop subsequently has developed a relationship with the Freedom Theatre, whose US tours it has hosted on several occasions, and with the Arab-American theatre company Nibras. But both plays remain controversial, especially in Israel: in July 2013, the deputy mayor of Jerusalem called for the Khan Theatre in Jerusalem to be defunded as punishment for its staging of the first Hebrew-language production of My Name is Rachel Corrie (Kaufman 2013).

7. In what follows, I refer to the historical figure of Rachel Corrie as “Corrie” and the dramatic protagonist as “Rachel”.

8. See Cantrell (2013) for an account of the disagreements between Rickman and Viner during the editing process: he reports that Rickman wanted to avoid unnecessary controversy, while Viner, as a journalist, was committed to telling Corrie’s story.

9. This claim conceivably influences Churchill’s own thinking: she cites Shlaim’s article in a discussion with Ari Roth, who directed a production of Seven Jewish Children at Theater J in March 2009 (see Churchill 2009b).