Now, two decades later, My Name… has been revived by an (almost) all-Jewish team willing to brave the potential backlash, comprising British-German actor Sascha Shinder, British-South African producer Gabriel Speechly and Scottish director Susan Worsfold. And it couldn’t have come at a more pertinent time, with tensions relating to the Israel-Palestine conflict only heightening following the 7 October attacks in 2023.
Led by Shinder, this one-woman performance is aided only by shifts in lighting, the actor’s voice and her position on a lone stool in the centre of a dark room. No backdrops, no props and no soundtrack distract from the most important part of the play: Corrie’s words. After all, it is composed, verbatim, from emails to and from her parents and friends, to-do lists and entries from diaries that she’d kept since she was 10.
In fact, most of the hour-and-a-half play recounts the activist’s life before she flew to Gaza. Shinder delivers her monologue, dressed plainly in light blue jeans, a loose white shirt and kaffiyeh (traditional Middle Eastern scarf with a chequered print). Her feet are bare and her hair is in a short messy bob that almost covers the small gold hoops hanging from her ears. As she speaks, we gain a picture of Corrie, a somewhat guileless and petulant young woman, growing up in Olympia, Washington. We discover her love of art and fighting for what she believes in; her dislike of house shares and how she can never find a pen; awkward interactions with her latest crush; and a desire to be “everything, from wandering poet to First Lady”. She is combative, not yet comfortable in her own skin, nor has she quite found her place in the world. “I didn’t give a shit if I was mediocre,” she says of the moment she realised she wanted to be an artist and writer, “I didn’t give a shit if I starved to death.”
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