If you want to know how free a society is, look at what’s happening in its theatres

‘Pieced together from diary entries and emails, it is an encounter with the present as much as the past.’ Sascha Shinder in My Name Is Rachel Corrie at the Old Red Lion theatre, London, 2024. Photograph: Courtesy of Sascha Shinder

‘A play should be an act of moral imagination,” said the late British playwright Edward Bond, who died three months ago and who, in his lifetime, spoke about theatre’s absolute right to address the most difficult issues of its day.

Perhaps a revival ought to be an act of moral imagination, too. So I found myself thinking this week while I watched a verbatim drama from 2005 at the Old Red Lion theatre in north London, amid a packed audience. My Name Is Rachel Corrie is about the 23-year-old American who travelled to the Gaza Strip in 2003 to aid Palestinians living under occupation and was killed by an Israeli bulldozer.