The hit Broadway play of To Kill a Mockingbird, adapted by The West Wing writer Aaron Sorkin, is to open in London, it has been confirmed. The play will arrive in the West End in spring 2020, marking the 60th anniversary of the publication of Harper Lee’s Pulitzer-winning novel about Atticus Finch, a small-town lawyer in 1930s Alabama who defends a black man wrongly accused of rape
The cast for the British production has not yet been announced. The play has been running for a year on Broadway with Jeff Daniels in the role of Finch and adult actors portraying the children in the story. The New York production opened after the estate of Harper Lee and the play’s producers “amicably settled” lawsuits regarding changes to the characterisations, particularly of Finch.
In a four-star review for the Guardian, Alexis Soloski considered it a “superbly entertaining and handsomely acted” production and wrote that “Sorkin has tried, rightly or wrongly, to make the story more palatable for 2018 and the parallels between 1930s America and the America of today even more explicit”.
To Kill a Mockingbird, directed by Bartlett Sher and designed by Miriam Buether, will begin performances at the Gielgud theatre in London in May next year. A separate US touring production will open at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC in August.
