Simon Ward reviews My Name Is Rachel Corrie at the Old Red Lion Theatre

This is a verbatim play created by Katherine Viner and Alan Rickman, based on the emails and diary entries of Rachel Corrie. The facts of Rachel’s life and death are stark. She was born and brought up in Olympia, Washington, USA. As she grew up she became increasingly concerned about injustice around the world, and America’s role in perpetuating it. She decided that she needed to take some action and so at the age of 23 she went to Gaza. She was part of the International Solidarity Movement which was attempting to intervene between the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) and Palestinian civilians. On 16th March 2003 she stood in front of an IDF bulldozer which was attempting to demolish a Palestinian’s home. The bulldozer ran her over and she was killed.

Viner and Rickman have managed to weave a compelling narrative from a truncated lifetime’s worth of material. It is touching to hear Rachel as a child taking her first faltering steps through education, entering adolescence and discovering boys. What is most striking is how perfectly everyday it all is. Her preoccupations, hopes and dreams are almost stereotypically normal – what to wear, how to decorate her room, how to navigate sibling rivalries. Her idealism is perhaps more pronounced than most – whilst many young people share her desires for greater equality and justice in the world, for Rachel it seems to become a guiding purpose in life. She has to get involved and try to do something to help.

The correspondence with her parents forms some of the most compelling and heartbreaking testimony. Her engagement with the Palestinian people among whom she lives shines through – she seems to understand them, and to relate to them as people rather than simply victims. This empathy makes her passionately angry with how the everyday obstacles put in their way by the Israeli regime can be so devastating, making it impossible for anyone just to live their normal lives. She is acutely aware, too, of her own privilege. She has chosen to be in Gaza. She can leave whenever she wants. But she stays because she hopes that bearing witness can help to alleviate the situation. And she makes the fatal mistake of thinking that her status will protect her from oncoming destruction. It’s almost too painful when she writes to her parents about when she might come home, just days before her death. It is unbearable when we see a video of her as a young child explaining how she wants to eradicate poverty from the world.

Directed by Sophia Rosen-Fouladi, with creative sound design by Ben Edwards, the central performance by Sascha Shinder really manages to get under Rachel’s skin, from all her naive optimism to her frustrated impotence. This is a powerful, compelling piece of theatrical polemic – it is an angry, heartbreaking howl of rage against an unbearable situation. The fact that nothing has changed for the better in the 21 years since Rachel’s death makes it all the more devastating.

This run is raising funds to provide support for Rafah and Gaza.

My Name Is Rachel Corrie is running until Saturday 29th June at the Old Red Lion Theatre, 418 St John Street, London EC1V 4NJ