Elyse Dodgson and the Rachel Corrie Project

Elyse Dodgson was responsible for the creation of a stage work, My Name is Rachel Corrie, based on the diaries of a young girl who was killed in Palestine by an Israeli bulldozer. When the play was performed by Megan Dodds last year at the Royal Court Theatre upstairs it was so successful that it was transferred to the theatre downstairs. It was supposed to play in New York in March 2006, but caused such controversy that the run was cancelled. Now it is going to New York after all, and Elyse has talked to the Genesis Foundation web site about it.

I want to mention a project from last year that is ongoing and of which we are all very proud: My Name is Rachel Corrie. It came about because Alan Rickman directed the first reading of Vassily Sigarev's Plasticine for the Russian week in 2001. So he had a connection with us already and this just shows how the work connects up too.

When Rachel died her emails were published in The Guardian newspaper in London and Alan phoned me up about them. He found the writing remarkable. We got in touch with the family. This was a slow and difficult process. It took over a year "they were not ready yet so soon after Rachel's death" but they came to the Royal Court to see how we worked and to talk and they got interested.

A year or so later, Rachel's sister gathered together for us everything she had ever written - a real labour of love. This is a young girl who would have written a great American novel or play, we are sure of that. The Royal Court being a theatre for new writing and Rachel Corrie having died at 23, we had a young writer whose quality of writing moved us so much that we had to do something about it.

I brought in Catherine Viner, from The Guardian. She has covered our work and travelled with us to the Middle East so she had a strong interest and knowledge about the International Programme here. We had received 184 very closely typewritten pages from the family - diaries, notebooks, letters. Alan and Catherine had to get together and turn that into a play.

When it was produced at the Royal Court Upstairs, aside from the rave reviews and the brilliant performance by Megan Dodds as Rachel, it was clear that it was a young person's play. We had no idea it would be such a success. From our point of view it is not about any controversy; but about a young woman and her words. Rachel was someone who cared. We didn't turn her into a martyr. She could be infuriating at times and the play shows that too. We were very involved with people who were part of her life so that it would come out right, be accurate. I think the family all agreed that we achieved this.

It was so sold out and acclaimed that we brought it back to the theatre downstairs, something we don't do very much. As we think this play is an American tragedy, we want it to be in New York. Lots of American students in London said we had to bring it over there.

As everyone may know, we had a false start with a theatre in New York who cancelled the play only four weeks before it was supposed to open. The scenery was already sitting in containers at the docks in Southampton ready for shipping to New York.

It was a huge controversy and a very painful one. But now we are on course. Only there are huge expectations because of that controversy. The play will open in the Minetta Lane Theatre in the West Village in New York - previews start on 5 October. We are presenting the exact same production as the one in London, with Megan Dodds as Rachel.

We are booked for a seven week run initially and we will see what happens. But there will be more productions.  The requests to do the play are coming from all over the world all the time.