My Name is Rachel Corrie at the Young Vic review ****

My Name is Rachel Corrie

Young Vic, 6th October 2017

I have raved about actor Erin Doherty in the past. She was the lynchpin in the excellent ensemble for Jack Thorne’s Junkyard (Junkyard at the Rose Theatre review *****), and was unbearably poignant in Katherine Soper’s excellent debut play Wish List. I gather from the reviews that she is the best thing about the possibly misconceived The Divide, Alan Ayckbourn’s new play. I will make my own mind up when it comes to the Old Vic.

Ms Doherty seems to have that rare ability of making an immediate emotional connection to an audience. There are plenty of other qualities that the best stage actors possess and I get that sometimes we may not need, or want, that emotional connection to the actors on stage, depending on the play, but when we do, it is genuinely thrilling and quite rare in my experience.

My Name is Rachel Corrie premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in 2005, and has popped up around the world ever since. It was written by the generous Alan Rickman together with Katharine Viner, now editor in chief of the Guardian (she is the one who begs you for a contribution if you read the Guardian content online – just pay up if you don’t want the digital world to end up full of crap content provided by idiots like me). It is based on the diaries, journals and e-mails of Rachel Corrie, an activist who was killed in contentious circumstances in the Gaza Strip when protesting the demolition of the home of a Palestinian family.

Ms Corrie was clearly a young woman of immense talent and passion. Her parents, who Ms Doherty sketches with great skill, her education and her location in liberal Washington state (“a place for hippie kids”), combined to create a world view that she determined to explore through action and not just words. Her writings reveal a woman who was anything but dull and worthy, they are shot through with poetry, humour and self-awareness. She was also no political ingenue, as some might have you believe, and constantly questioned her views and the legitimacy and value of her protest. She did have a strong view on the plight of Palestinians, which deepened with engagement after she joined the International Solidarity Movement, and this is fully exposed in the play, which also has little truck with the Israeli view of her death as an “accident”. This firm, but remember still personal stance, is what has led to continued complaints about the content of the play by Israeli advocate organisations.

I found the passages from Ms Corrie’s precocious early life (“everyone must feel safe”), and from the days before her death, most intense, as she seemed to determine how and why her life, and possible death, would have an impact. The last e-mail home sums it all up. The need to get things done, made transparent in her constant list writing, and to get others to listen, pervades Ms Doherty’s energetic performance. The set design from Sophie Thomas is minimal, just a wooden wall, with a handful of props. Ms Doherty even gets to change some of Joe Price’s blunt lighting design. Kieran Lucas’s sound design is equally direct. Wisely then, director Josh Roche, who chose to stage this play as the winner of 2017 JMK Award, leaves his actor alone to find Ms Corrie’s voice. Which she does. Brilliantly.

I don’t know how sympathetic Ms Doherty is to the message of the play, nor do I care. She is an actor. It is her job. But I do think she had real sympathy for her character which informed her impassioned performance. I await her next role (after the aforementioned Divide) with real interest.