I have been fortunate enough to see many fantastic plays at Leeds Playhouse but To Kill A Mockingbird is hands down the best performance I have seen there.
I still have the copy of the book I could not return to the college library because I loved it so much, so to see this Aaron Sorkin production of it for the theatre was a real treat. Sorkin’s stage adaptation was the highest grossing American play in the history of Broadway.
The set design brilliantly sets the mood and grounds you firmly in 1930s Maycomb, Alabama. It was fascinating to see the cast manipulate the stage furniture and suddenly you were on the Finch’s front porch or in the courtroom. The moving of the scenery and props was almost balletic and really helped to set the scene and make it an immersive experience.
The character of Dill, performed expertly by Dylan Malyn, helped to narrate the story and also added much of the comic relief. In real life, Dill was based on Harper Lee’s childhood friend Truman Capote. Played by Tom he quickly became my favourite character, I couldn’t wait to hear what he would say next.
For a play with such a heavy storyline there was a perfect amount of humour to offset the emotional and harrowing aspects of the tale. This was mostly provided by Dill and by Anna Munden as Scout. She helps the audience understand the Jim Crow segregation setting of Maycomb, where the black population were forced to work in servitude and are vulnerable to the machinations of a white man’s justice and to the very real possibility of being killed by those who take ‘justice’ into their own hands. Along with Jem, played by Gabriel Scott, these characters allowed you to see the story unfold through the eyes of children.
Richard Coyle played a fantastic Atticus Finch but as it points out in the programme in an article by Afua Hirsch, bestselling writer and filmmaker:
“from today’s perspective, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that Lee’s book is, at it’s core, what we might now call a ‘White Saviour’ narrative. Atticus Finch is a hero willing to put himself and his family in danger to fight racial injustice, but the black characters at the heart of that injustice are almost silent. The story reads instead as something of an ode to well-intentioned white people, where the life and death of an innocent black man served mainly to deepen their understanding of American racism.”
The character of Calpurnia, played wonderfully by Andrea Davy, the Finches’ maid, was necessarily enhanced by Sorkin in order to balance this out. We get to hear a black woman’s perspective, a glaring absence in Lee’s novel. When she criticises Atticus for expecting her to be grateful for his actions, this is especially powerful.
It was a packed out audience and the emotions in the room were palpable throughout the performance – it ended to rapturous applause and a rousing standing ovation from the whole cohort of theatregoers. If you get the chance to see it, you will never forget it.
