Review: My name is Rachel Corrie at Alphabetti Theatre
Susan Wear reports back from a powerful and timely theatre revival in Newcastle
A young American activist travelled to the Gaza Strip to aid Palestinians living under Israeli occupation.
While trying to stop the demolition of homes in Rafah, she was killed by a bulldozer. She was 23. It was 2003.
After she died, late actor Alan Rickman and the journalist Katherine Viner (now editor of The Guardian) edited the play, My Name is Rachel Corrie from Rachel’s diaries and email correspondence.
The play opened in 2005 and has been performed many times since, and on at least one occasion, been cancelled amid accusations of being one-sided.
With peace still seeming out of reach in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and beyond, it is a good time for this revival produced by wet arts ltd and Alphabetti Theatre – an example of how theatre can tell the simple but powerful stories of individuals that history would never see otherwise.
It’s not so much a diatribe against Israel but the story of Rachel’s own journey from the fifth grader in school assembly whose urgent message is ‘everybody must feel safe’, to working in conservation work and mental health care, while she figures out that what she really wants to do is become a writer and poet.
But first she needs experience and visits cold, dirty but fascinating Russia, where the coal dust turns the snow black, and cries when she sees the Washington skyline from the plane home.
Next she heads for Gaza with the International Solidarity Movement, joining protests against the Israeli Defence Force and making friends with Palestinian families and professionals.
There are moments where you hold your breath as Glendenning-Laycock lays out the terror, the frustration, the depression, in between the adrenalin-fuelled moments of action.
The sparse, evocative design by director Ryan Hay – a whitewashed background, a tiny border of red earth and the only props a notebook and half a dozen microphones – is a platform for Rebecca Glendenning-Laycock (Rachel) to give the performance of their flourishing career so far.
She holds the audience for the entire 90 minutes or so - it’s an outstanding feat when the material ranges from emails Rachel wrote to her parents, their replies to her, lists of things to remember or people she’d like to have dinner with, to her thoughts and fears for the people around her.
It feels authentic to the core. Rachel says she’s determined to fill every spare moment writing in her diary as she so regrets the blank spaces in her Russian journal.
She talks of her phobia of people, imagining herself in a Mountain Dew advert and worries about the salmon in the drainage pipes under the city.
Read more: Surveying the landscapes at The Laing
Glendenning-Laycock’s apple-cheeked optimism and energy bounds from a young woman desperate to be able to help do something, sometimes terrified, always with a prescience about how little time there is, to relaying the voices of her supportive, proud but very anxious parents who know their daughter can’t persuaded to come home.
There are moments where you hold your breath as she lays out the terror, the frustration, the depression, in between the adrenalin-fuelled moments of action.
It’s a play about a passionately caring young woman who followed her desperate urge to do something - simply to try to keep people safe.
Brought to life by Glendenning-Laycock, Hay and the team at Alphabetti - including the technical team of Shevek Imogen Fodor, Andrea Scrimshaw and Hannah Richardson - prove it to be still relevant, still powerful, still needs to be seen.
Exactly what playwriting, uniquely, can offer the future historians who will be trying to make sense of such enduring global human conflicts.
My name is Rachel Corrie is at Alphabetti Theatre until October 26. Bookings and more information can be found here.