Balm to the soul for liberal-minded theatregoers, Aaron Sorkin’s stately adaptation of Harper Lee’s American classic makes a welcome return to the West End. It’s a courtroom drama, a coming-of-age tale and a lesson in decency, in which small-town lawyer Atticus Finch defends a black man wrongfully accused of rape in Alabama in 1934.
Sorkin, the creator of The West Wing and writer of The Social Network among much, much else, excels at smooth talk and moral certitude. Broadway director Bartlett Sher’s production was first seen in London in 2022 with Rafe Spall in the lead and then Matthew Modine. Now with a quizzical, oaky-voiced Richard Coyle as Atticus, the show is a little ponderous but remains a supremely well put-together piece of theatre.
Lee’s novel, published in 1960 amid the push for civil rights in America, is narrated by Atticus’s tomboy daughter Scout, who is six years old at the start. Sher’s production splits the storytelling up between Scout (Anna Munden), her older brother Jem (Gabriel Scott) and their garrulous new friend Dill (Dylan Malyn), who’s summering with an aunt in Maycomb.
They address us directly from what seems, in Miriam Buether’s design, to be a shabby warehouse or grain store. Inside this the rest of the large cast assemble the scenery of the courtroom, the jail, and the Finches’ home, to the folksy strains of a barrel-organ. This is an eloquent visual expression of the way a small community pulls together, for good or ill.
The gentle, despairing farmer whose land has been entailed following the Depression, and who can only pay Atticus in firewood and sacks of nuts, is also the Klansman carrying a rope. Monsters don’t come from outside: they are “our friends and neighbours”. It’s a sign of our debased times that Atticus’s belief that you should look for the good in everyone, and treat all with equal respect, now seems hopelessly old-fashioned.
Coyle has a beady, shrewd alertness and a flair for wry amusement as Atticus. Though not a large man he projects fortitude with his square-shouldered, hands-in-pockets stance, his pale suit immaculate amid a sea of patched and stained workwear. The child-acting of our three narrators is perhaps a little over-busy, but the earnestness of early life is well captured, along with Lee’s elegantly spooling southern sentences.
Nasty old Mrs Dubose is “the meanest woman ever accidentally created by God”, according to Scout. A wistfully reflective Jem says: “If I could take back one minute of my life it’d be the one where I accused my father of bein’ a coward.” Malyn contributes a nice comic turn as the gangly Dill, barely able to contain his thoughts and body language.
There’s an energetically loathsome, N-word spraying performance from Oscar Pearce as Bob Ewell, whose daughter Mayella has brought her accusation against kindly local cotton-picker Tom Robinson to cover up different transgressions.
As Tom, Aaron Shosanya has a quiet dignity and the sad, level gaze of a man who knows innocence won’t save him. There are pleasing supporting performances from Andrea Davy as Atticus’s housekeeper Calpurnia, David Kennedy as the local famer Link Deas(YES), and Stephen Boxer as the wearily sagacious Judge Taylor.
“All rise,” intones Scout at the end of each act. It’s a symbolic summons to get to our feet, a notification that attention must be paid to injustice and those who fight against it. Need we point out why To Kill a Mockingbird feels relevant now, when wounds dating back to the Civil War are being reopened in America, and the Overton Window of what is politically and socially permissible has so drastically shifted?
Sher’s production dawdles towards the end but it’d take a hard heart not to be moved by the revelation of Dill’s home situation, so different to life with the idealised Atticus. And by the closing rendition of the hymn Joy Cometh in the Morning by the entire cast of 24. All rise, indeed.
To Sept 12, wyndhamstheatre.co.uk
