Review: To Kill a Mockingbird

 Aaron Sorkin's stage adaptation of Harper Lee's novel To Kill a Mockingbird has been running at the Gielgud Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue since March 2022, and is currently booking until 20th May 2023. The production is quite exceptional in terms of the script, acting, set and lighting designs. If you have the chance to see it, the play is very highly recommended. It justified completely drawing applause at the interval curtain (I haven't seen that happen before) and a standing ovation at the final curtain.

In most respects, the play is very faithful to the original novel. It very cleverly interleaves the earlier episodes of the novel with the development of the trial of Tom Robinson; and, by using the device of Scout, Jem and Dill acting as narrators alongside the acted scenes, it successfully captures the way in which the novel portrays its events through the eyes of the children. My appreciation of the play was very much enhanced by familiarity with the novel from a recent reading - that familiarity enables a much readier recognition of the significance of scenes in the play. I suspect that someone seeing the play without having previously read the novel will have a very different experience than someone who is already familiar with the story.

There is, however, one area in which the playwright has deliberately chosen to differ from the novel and to thereby place his work within the context of the early 2020's rather than a context of the early 1960's when the novel was written or the 1930's when it is set. According to the progamme, Aaron Sorkin noted that the novel included two significant African- American characters, but that neither of them have very much to say. He also notes that a story of racial tension is told through the eyes of a young white girl, Scout. He therefore wishes to enhance the voice of the black characters and to reimagine the dynamics of the relationship between the black and white characters.

Instead of there being actors to represent the all white jury at Tom Robinson's trial, the seats of the jury box are unoccupied, though the lawyers, Atticus Finch in particular, are shown addressing themselves to the jury. This effectively, though subtly, expresses the absence of an effective black voice in the trial. That the racist rants of Bob Ewell have been drawn from commenters publishing on the Breitbart website - something that is not apparent when you listen to it in the play but is referred to in the programme - indicates a certain relocating of the play to a contemporary time.

There are two sub-plots shown in dialogue between Calpurnia and Atticus that articulate the reimagining intended by the playwright. Calpurnia calls out Atticus when he has presumed that she should say thank you to him for an act which was only the naturally right thing to do. It is the idea that a black person should have a particular demand of gratitude placed on them because of their colour that is here being challenged. (Aaron Sorkin has seen this in a scene in the novel where the coloured community are shown thanking Atticus for his defence of Tom Robinson). She also observes, in the context of Atticus' insistence that even those guilty of racism are people deserving of respect, that he might think about how that respecting of them is at the same time a disrespecting of those who are the targets of their racism. Aaron Sorkin sees this aspect of Atticus' character as excusing the racism that ought not to be excused, and expresses it in this dialogue between Calpurnia and Atticus. For the playwright, this is the flaw in Atticus' character that Harper Lee had already given him in writing the novel; but it could equally be argued that it represents an imposition on Harper Lee's novel from a later, perhaps to some extent ideological, point of view.

I think that Atticus Finch, if he were a real person, could justifiably complain about this re-writing of his character, with its adverse effect on his good name. For most of the play's audience, though, I suspect that the fidelity in other respects to the novel leaves Atticus' good name intact. I came away from the play, though,  feeling that it had not completely captured the character of Atticus that I recall from reading the novel.

All of this is subtle detail to be discovered from reading the programme. The play, seen in itself, remains an outstanding piece of theatre in every way. If you have the chance to see it, I would make sure you take it.