To Kill a Mockingbird: a ‘powerfully uplifting’ theatrical event

Aaron Sorkin’s script makes this 62-year-old literary classic ‘feel like it was minted yesterday’

Performers on stage
‘Far from creaking like a period piece’, this is a riveting drama

Aaron Sorkin’s “blistering” stage adaptation of Harper Lee’s tale of racial injustice in 1930s Alabama was a huge hit on Broadway, and it looks set to storm the West End too, said Patrick Marmion in the Daily Mail.

Rafe Spall is “stunning” in the role of Finch, said Clive Davis in The Times. In an engrossing performance, he presents the lawyer as a courageous, but arguably naive, man whose faith in decency “may not be enough to tackle the poison lurking in his home town”.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

This is a “revelatory staging” that “blazingly captures the zeitgeist”, agreed Dominic Cavendish in The Daily Telegraph. Sorkin has taken three “intelligent liberties” with the material: he has “prised the narrative viewpoint away from Finch’s admiring daughter, Scout”; stretched the pivotal rape trial right across the action instead of holding it back for the second half; and given a far greater voice to the black characters. Jude Owusu’s “solemn, sorrowful Tom Robinson breaks your heart”, while Pamela Nomvete as the Finches’ housekeeper Calpurnia “speaks volumes with every reproachful questioning look”.

Scout, Jem and Dill are all played by adults, said Arifa Akbar in The Guardian – a “high-risk venture which pays off remarkably well”. Miriam Buether’s set is “fluid, mobile and unshowily gorgeous”. The piece retains a “slight lack of subtlety”, said Nick Curtis in the London Evening Standard: Atticus is too saintly, the “kids too winsome and cheeky”. Still, this is a “powerfully uplifting” theatrical event. “All rise for a magnificent Mockingbird.”

Gielgud Theatre, London W1. Until 13 August Running time: 2hrs 50mins (incl. interval)