Writer: Rachel Corrie, edited by Alan Rickman and Katharine Viner
Director: Sophia Rosen-Fouladi
In Alan Rickman’s diaries, published posthumously in 2022, he describes the vitality of the writings of Rachel Corrie as “a clarion in the fog”. In assembling the play, constructed of Corrie’s diaries and emails to her family, Rickman, along with writer Katharine Viner, could be confident of attracting a greater audience than might have been expected without their involvement. This reality clearly sat uncomfortably within Rickman’s ethos. Elsewhere in his diaries, he laments how the cynical manipulation of celebrity to publicise the play obfuscates the singularity of the writing. “IT’S NOT ABOUT ME”, he writes, “BUT WE HAVE TO SELL IT”, his marketing team counter.
Nevertheless, the power of My Name Is Rachel Corrie as a piece of political theatre rests precisely within this paradox. Rachel Corrie, a 23-year-old, white, middle-class American, had no connection to Palestine when she travelled there in 2003 with the International Solidarity Movement. The play is built on extracts from Corrie’s diary going back to her childhood in Washington State, alongside reference to her romantic life and her job as a care worker.
Far from feeling irrelevant, the intricacies of Corrie’s life before Palestine are fundamental to the play’s success. Corrie’s separateness from the people of Palestine is specifically what enables us to hear her story. That the violence enacted upon her resulted in international condemnation, while the deaths of Palestinians in their hundreds and thousands are ignored, should ignite fury. Moreover, it is this fury that can and will be harnessed to create real political change.
In practical terms, this is an imperfect production, which feels shaky and underprepared. Sascha Shinder’s performance in the title role is enthusiastic but fundamentally too self-conscious and unfocused to inspire the audience’s confidence. Similarly, the brilliance of Corrie’s writing is at times undercut by Shinder’s rushed and occasionally garbled diction, with the result that important words and meaning are lost.
Despite this, there is no doubt that Shinder’s performance is fuelled with a legitimate and palpable outrage, which comes through in her performance particularly towards the end of the play and, in conjunction with Corrie’s stunningly prescient writing, cannot help but be galvanising.
Elsewhere in the production there are some technical issues that compete with the writing, rather than complement it. The performance is backlit by the electrical throb of a live webcam projection throughout. At key moments, this serves to depict what conversations between Corrie and her family might have been like, had they occurred in the era of the video call rather than email and, in so doing, contracts the distance between 2003 and 2024. Mostly, though, the endless feedback of psychedelic colour and light feels distracting and somewhat careless.
Ultimately though, the shakiness of the production hardly matters. This is a piece of theatre that has been curated out of a desperate need for action. All company profit from ticket sales will go towards rescuing families imperilled within the warzone Corrie wrote about 20 years ago. The cast and much of the creative team are Jewish, lending a Brechtian legitimacy to Corrie’s rumination: “Whose interest does it serve to identify Israeli policy with all Jewish people?”
If British theatre can sometimes run the risk of seeming irrelevant, this production of My Name Is Rachel Corrie could not be more politically apposite. Indeed, that the play has an unofficial, albeit muffled, soundtrack of the England V Slovenia match from the pub downstairs, serves as a prescient reminder of the West’s ability to blithely persevere whilst funding the total collapse of an infrastructure three 3000 miles away.
Runs until 29 June 2024
