My Name is Rachel Corrie

Published Tuesday 15 August 2006 at 13:00 by William McEvoy

After the recent, successful West End run, Rachel Corrie’s story is now familiar. She was a 23-year-old American woman killed in the Gaza strip in 2003 by a bulldozer about to demolish the house of a Palestinian pharmacist. This play, edited and adapted for the stage by Alan Rickman and Katharine Viner, is composed of excerpts from her journals and emails, recalling her childhood, the growth of her political beliefs and her final experiences in Palestine.

The beautiful, evocative text throbs with a peculiarly American idealism. It shows how much Corrie had a writer’s imagination, lingering on the sensual and the tangible, such as the coal dust on snow in Russia or her mother’s habit of putting her jewellery back into its small boxes. She was a woman shaped by the landscape writings of great American authors, singing to the forest in all its green splendour, taking inspiration from salmon swimming upstream.

Corrie’s growing political consciousness goes hand in hand with her environmentalism. To her, the world was a thing of wonder, making all the useless deaths and violence in it more acutely painful. She blames countries and leaders for war and conflict, careful to distinguish the policies of the state of Israel from the Jewish people themselves. Indeed, her explicit awareness of the risk of anti-Semitism and of her ambivalent position as an American citizen offsets possible claims that she is too pro-Palestinian.

Recast from the London run, Josephine Taylor’s performance as Corrie is controlled and confident in a production directed with great clarity. She amply conveys Corrie’s rare combination of naivety and determination, an innocence about realpolitik underpinning her activism where others might ask what is to be done. Sound effects of military vehicles and gunfire are used economically, while the set of a teenager’s bedroom, later giving way to the sun-bleached stone houses of Palestine, is strikingly simple and suggestive.

As she sits under a strip light, emailing her parents, in scenes driven forward by the increasing urgency of her fear and our knowledge of her imminent death, Corrie finally begins to understand the remorseless nature of the violence for which her idealism is no resistance.