Lorna Irvine is greatly moved by Mull Theatre's touring production.
As the audience enter the space, Eminem pumps out and Rachel Corrie (Mairi Phillips) screams along to Pat Benatar’s Love Is A Battlefield on her MP3, sitting on her bed in skimpy clothes. It feels voyeuristic, wrong, almost like we have become the kind of scumbags who use live porn webcams to tell women what to do. However, as we are about to look into Corrie’s real diaries and hear her answering machine messages, this is intentional.
Director Ros Philips gets a stunning one-woman monologue from Phillips- the first half, building an impassioned portrait that is personal, the second half, her political activism. Corrie constantly tears herself down, as the young and insecure do, berating her lack of awareness at the situation she is getting herself into and acting out scenarios with ex boyfriends using lamps as actors .She comes across as articulate and likeable, yet naive and vulnerable, unable to do anything but hurtle full-speed into any given situation.
Following her journey to Palestine, where the cold hard facts hit her, the statistics of civilian deaths become like white noise and the monitors behind her juxtapose Tom and Jerry cartoons (which the children watch as the Israeli Defence Foundation bomb the homes next to them) with the violence that surrounds them.
Rachel Corrie was killed by a US – supplied bulldozer created to knock down Palestinian homes on March 16th, 2003. Aged just 23, she foresaw her death, but as this unique and moving piece of verbatim theatre shows, it has not been for nothing- as her story spreads, more people take up her baton and join the struggle for peace.
My Name is Rachel Corrie tour until March 9. For more information, go to: www.rachelcorriefoundation.org
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