Writer: Aaron Sorkin
Director: Bartlett Sher
First performed on Broadway in 2018 at the mid-point of the first Trump presidency, the contemporary relevance of Aaron Sorkin’s take on Harper Lee’s classic novel has only grown in subsequent years. However, unlike some books or plays, which need changes to time or setting to show why they are valid in the present day, To Kill a Mockingbird requires no updating. Sorkin and director Bartlett Sher recognise this, and what they deliver is a story set in small town in Alabama in 1934 that has messages that resonate across the world.
At the heart of the play, as in the book, is the trial of an innocent black man, Tom Robinson, falsely accused of raping Mayella Ewell, a white woman who is the daughter of Bob Ewell, a racist bigot in a town where the American Civil War and the ending of slavery seventy years previously is still an open wound.
The lawyer given the job of defending Robinson is Atticus Finch, a man with a clear sense of justice and fairness, but also with an unwavering belief that you cannot just condemn racism and acts motivated by prejudice, you must also try to get inside the skin of the perpetrator and seek to understand the motives behind their actions.
The complexities of this moral stand point are the source of the drama that unfolds outside of the trial scenes, with the tensions it creates between Atticus, his children Jem and Scout and his black housekeeper and long standing confidante Calpurnia. These are driven by their lack of understanding of the tolerance and patience he can extend to people who behave in a way that most right thinking people would instinctively condemn. They also serve to open up the debate that the play seeks to provoke as Atticus has to deal with the consequences of his standpoint.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given that he was the writer of A Few Good Men and the man behind the multi-award winning West Wing TV show, the main change Sorkin has made to Lee’s original is to frame the drama around the trial, having it as the focus of the play from the start rather than something that emerges from the story after the setting and characters have been established.
This is an excellent decision that not only effectively tackles the problem of how to condense a three hundred page novel into a two and a half hour script, but also brings out the central theme in the book and provides a different reading on the attitudes of the townsfolk by showing the consequences of their actions before exploring the causes, thereby reducing the attempts to justify them to irrelevancies or excuses.
It also means that while Scout is the central character and narrator in the book, here she becomes ones of three narrators, alongside Jem and their friend Dill Harris, who provide a commentary on the trial and village life with a child-like perspective that often highlights a wisdom and understanding that many of their adult contemporaries are lacking.
For the opening night of the Edinburgh run, understudy John J. O’Hagan stepped into Atticus’s shoes in the place of Richard Coyle who was unwell. What would have been a standout performance even if he had been playing the lead throughout the tour was all the more impressive when you realise it is the first time O’Hagan has performed the part in front of a large paying audience, as he commands the stage with a presence that makes the play convincingly revolve around his character.
As Scout and Jem, Anna Munden and Gabriel Scott had a superb chemistry with the former’s energy and enthusiasm combing with the latter’s developing maturity and sense of emerging moral outrage. While the initial over-enthusiasm and simplicity of Dill, played by Dylan Malyn, felt slightly jarring and out of place, Malyn worked well to bring out the greater wisdom and deeper understanding of what makes a good person and a good world that Dill had gained as a result of his own unusual upbringing.
As Tom Robinson, Aaron Shosanya gave an understated, perfectly measured performance that captured a respectful character caught up in a situation where he knew that his accusers held all the cards simply because he had a different colour skin from them.
As his accusers, Evie Hargreaves and Oscar Pearce as Mayella and Bob Ewell, pulled off the difficult feat of making their characters more than just pantomime villains, as they spat out a rage born out of an unjustified belief in an entitlement that wasn’t theirs. Hargreaves also expertly conveyed Mayella’s battle between unquestioning loyalty to her father and the reality of a life that showed this to be misplaced.
The only minor problem with the production is that the restructuring of the story reduces some of the scenes that relate to the children rather than the trial, such as their attempts to access Boo Radley’s house, to the status of distractions from the main story rather than an essential part of the spine of it. Their relevance, or the relevance of Boo at least, becomes clear at the end of the play, but even here they seem to prolong the eventual conclusion by adding additional elements to it.
This aside, however, this is an excellent production where a superb script is brought to life by passionate direction and compelling performances from all of the cast.
Runs until 25 October then touring | Image: Johan Persson
