Review: My Name is Rachel Corrie

My Name is Rachel Corrie
The writings of Rachel Corrie edited by Alan Rickman and Katharine Viner
Bareboard Productions and B Sharp


I never know anything about plays that I am going to see. Unless its part of the well-known fare of Shakespeare, Pinter, Beckett or Brecht.

But every now and again a play comes up that breaks the mould and I am forced to read something about it due to some interest or controversy. It doesn’t happen often, but with My Name is Rachel Corrie it certainly did.

I tend to ignore most media reporting about shows coming up primarily due to their predictable press release nature, but my attention was quickly attracted to this show because of a little anonymous titbit in The Australian.

In fact, I had heard about the play’s controversy previous to that article with cancellations of productions in the US etc etc.

It wasn’t until an anonymous person posted a link to the images of Rachel Corrie’s death on my site that the reality of her death and the stories in the newspapers came crashing together. I had been living in Slovenia when her death had occurred, and caught up in my own little world, I had missed the headlines.

But the majority of the audience would not have missed the headlines. As you file into the small intimate space of Downstairs Belvoir, a table is on your right and manned by a couple of Amnesty International volunteers. Its a little detail that you don’t see every time you go to the theatre that reminds you this story is based on very true events.

In My Name is Rachel Corrie, we find the title character (Belinda Bromilow) in a typical student home room. It has the usual clutter and cheap postcards on the wall. Gradually, she takes you into her confidence and emerges you in her typical student existence. What she does at college, the boys she is interested in, conversations with her parents, conversations with friends.

It also opens you up to her bright eyed and bushy tailed view of the world. That bridge you find yourself on from adolescents into adulthood, as you take on the universe in whatever way you can. She is typical of many.

But then again, not so typical. One day she takes herself off to Palestine, to work with the International Solidarity Movement to protest in support of Palestinians.

What strikes you most about Rachel Corrie’s writings is the way that writers Alan Rickman and Katharine Viner start every scene with a date. I had wished that the performer had punctuated those dates just a bit more, because with that context you realise he very short space of time it takes for events to unfold for Rachel Corrie.

Rickman and Viner provide an edition of her writing that gets to the heart of one girls life. And she is a girl in her parents eyes. As her father says to her in one of his letters, "I'm proud of you, but I would rather be proud of somebody else's daughter."

But they were always going to have a young fighter on their hands. At the very end of the production, old footage is shown of a primary school age Corrie giving a speech to her school about poverty and hunger in the third world. It, along with the Amnesty table compound how real this story is. It's the sadness of her tragic tale and the passion of someone so much better than who you are.

It is a simple production that doesn’t try and do too much to the script. It unfortunately doesn't take full advantage of the space in the theatre to really eye-ball the audience and I wish that the intimacy between the performer and the audience had been played with a lot more. But Bromilow’s performance is energetic, clear and elegant. This is a play very much worth seeing.

Belvoir Theatre Downstairs
$23-29 Until June 1.
02 9699 3444 belvoir.com.au