Tron Theatre, Glasgow, 5 February 2013, and touring

THE repertory success of My Name is Rachel Corrie around the globe can surely be attributed to a number of factors, not least its impetus as a piece of drama and the ease of staging a play with only one simple set and a single castmember.

EVEN more so, though, the sheer resonance of the story, of Corrie’s establishment as a normal young woman of hope and principle who undergoes a journey of discovery to the heart of a personal and international tragedy, is the kind of tale you experience and then wish everyone you know had seen with you. That it’s repeated so often is a good thing for our knowledge of the world, but it’s the kind of text that should be treated with care or left alone.

Mairi Phillips in My Name is Rachel Corrie (photo Tim Morozzo)

Director Ros Philips and actress Mairi Phillips have previous where My Name is Rachel Corrie is concerned, having staged it at the Citizens in Glasgow before embarking on this Scotland-wide tour with Mull Theatre. Crucially, Phillips gives a strong and endearing performance as Corrie, the 23-year-old American peace activist who was crushed to death in the Gaza Strip by a bulldozer driven by a member of the Israeli Defence Force in 2003, while attempting to stop it advancing on a Palestinian home.

Adapted from the journals, e-mails and even answerphone messages of Corrie herself, a keen writer, by the actor Alan Rickman and Guardian journalist Katharine Viner, this is crucially not a polemic or a story which imagines our opinion or knowledge of the Palestinian situation is set when we enter the theatre. It’s literally Corrie’s own story, her journey from an excitable early-90s adolescent who immerses herself in the “trivia” of small town life and obsesses over boys she likes in Olympia, Washington, whose eyes are opened to the breadth and depth of the world on a visit to Russia.

Phillips’ Corrie is vibrant and believable, the American accent perfectly-pitched and her unceasing movement around the stage placing us right there within a state of earnest emotional restlessness. One of the great subtleties of the text is that, while Corrie’s youthful idealism presents an eventually one-sided and arguably naïve view of the overall conflict, her eyewitness testimony dramatically brings home the on-the-ground horror ordinary Palestinians experience.

More than that, though, this is a definitive tale of political and spiritual awakening with some real lump-in-the-throat moments, not least a frank and beautifully tender email conversation between Corrie and her “neoliberal” father just as things are getting dangerous. The staging amid a bedframe, some anthropomorphic table lamps and a rucksack full of gear is efficient although obviously low-budget (two small televisions detract somewhat from the impact of the video inserts), but this high-quality version is effective enough to carry an impact long after Phillips has taken a well-deserved bow.

© David Pollock, 2013

Links

• Mull Theatre