11 – 22 November 2025
Aaron Sorkin’s masterful re-telling of Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird takes a fresh look at this groundbreaking story, first published sixty-five years ago. He has challenged some of the underlying assumptions of the original novel, creating a version that asks searching questions about just what it meant to be a virtuous white man in the Alabama of the 1930s. It presents a more morally nuanced portrayal of the central character, small town lawyer Atticus Finch (Richard Coyle) who is persuaded by the local judge to defend a black man wrongly accused of rape. Stage versions of great novels almost invariably involve a degree of simplification, a watering-down of the text, so it is a rare treat to see an adaptation that adds rather than subtracts.
Directed by Bartlett Sher, the story is told by Atticus’s children, Scout (Anna Munden) and Jem (Gabriel Scott) and their new friend Dill (Dylan Malyn). Scout is a bundle of youthful energy in her tomboy’s dungarees while Jem, somewhat less excitable, is nearing maturity. Dill is amusingly goofy and impulsive, but has flashes of insight. They act as narrators and as participants in the action, creating a vibrant immediacy to the delivery of their tale. There is much cutting back and forth in time and a considerable number of swift, if rather noisy, scene changes. Miriam Buether’s mobile set design facilitates these transfers from one location to another, with the well-choreographed cast acting as scene shifters, though unfortunately a technical glitch in this process brought the opening night’s performance to a premature end. Fortunately all now seems well. The cast of 24 actors perform with conviction, and the often very busy stage conveys a bustling sense of daily life in a small Alabama town.
The key event in the play is the trial of Tom Robinson (Aaron Shosanya), the black man falsely accused of rape. In Shosanya’s deeply moving performance we see that it is Tom’s determination to be his own man that undermines Atticus’s attempt to get him to perform the cowed, subservient role that white society expects of him. Tom ultimately brings about his own doom, but his principled behaviour contrasts tellingly with the racist ravings of his chief accuser, Bob Ewell (Oscar Pearce).
It is Ewell’s downtrodden and illiterate daughter Mayella (Evie Hargreaves) that Tom is accused of assaulting, but under cross-examination by Atticus it becomes clear that she has long been the victim of her abusive father and that it is he who has attacked her, though she cannot summon up enough courage to say so. Hargreaves brilliantly conveys her conflicted emotions as she wavers on the witness stand, finally exploding in an outburst of racist invective that she has clearly learned at home. It is distressing to hear the N-word delivered with such venom, but this play does not shirk from depicting a social system that was founded entirely upon racial prejudice.
This production benefits greatly from having Atticus played by an actor with a profound understanding of the role. With every telling gesture Coyle depicts a good man struggling against the ingrained injustices of his racist society, but struggling too with his own failings, not the least of which is a naive belief in the essential goodness of his fellow men. His insistence on treating even the most hate-fuelled bigots with courtesy and understanding is robustly questioned by his black maid Calpurnia (Andrea Davy). As with Tom, Calpurnia is given considerably more agency in this adaptation than she has in the original novel, and it is through her eyes that we see that Atticus, though highly principled, is in effect little more than a ‘white saviour’ whose idea of fairness for black people is shot through with condescension. As an educated, middle-class professional he underestimates the strength and depth of the brooding resentments that fuel the prejudiced behaviours of his poorer, less privileged neighbours many of whom ‘have battery acid in their veins.’ He is more complicit in their racism than he realises.
If there is optimism at the end it lies in the hint that his children will follow in his lawyerly footsteps, but perhaps with a clearer-eyed sense of just how much their society needs to change. This To Kill A Mockingbird is an exceptionally powerful play, and a model example of how to revisit a classic piece of literature from a 21st century perspective.
★★★★☆ Mike Whitton, 14 November 2025
Photography credit: Johan Persson
