To Kill a Mockingbird adapted by Aaron Sorkin – ★★★★☆
Harper Lee wrote Maycomb as a town frozen mid-thought, unable to finish reckoning with itself. Nearly a century later, the questions at the heart of To Kill a Mockingbird still feel uncomfortably alive. Adapted from Lee's 1960 novel, Aaron Sorkin's stage version follows Atticus Finch as he defends Tom Robinson, a Black man falsely accused of raping a white woman in 1930s Alabama, while his children watch the trial dismantle everything they thought they understood about their town.
In Bartlett Sher's production, the story functions as a lesson, and more urgently, as a warning. The play asks what happens when decency is mistaken for justice, when politeness is treated as moral courage and when faith in process becomes a way of avoiding the harder work of confronting evil directly. In the current political climate, that warning lands with real force.
The production opens with Dylan Malyn's Dill Harris, Scout Finch and Gabriel Scott's Jem Finch narrating Tom Robinson's trial into being. Jennifer Tipton's lighting does much of the storytelling work, cutting precisely between narration and live scene so that the audience always understands whether we are being told something or watching it happen. The constant movement between memory, testimony and action gives the production its energy, especially in the first act, where the narration sharpens and heightens both the drama and our emotional investment in the trial. However, in the second act, the production's movement between narration, immersion and interruption begins to work against itself. What feels illuminating in the first half becomes more disorientating later on. The constant pulling in and out of the action sometimes weakens the emotional force of what is unfolding, particularly when the trial should be allowed to sit in its full horror.
Richard Coyle's Atticus is played with a calm faith in the American legal system that borders on naivety. He believes in reason, order and procedure, but the production is most interesting when it shows the limits of that belief. His civility is treated as a virtue for much of the play, until it becomes painfully clear that civility was never going to be enough to save Tom Robinson. Atticus cannot fully see that the system he trusts so completely does not protect the Black underclass in American society, the same way it protects him.
Anna Munden's Scout inherits that faith almost completely. Her performance carries much of the play's comedy, sweet without slipping into precocity, and her narration keeps the story tethered to a child's understanding of events that are anything but childish. The trial is really the point where her sense of the world starts to change, where things stop feeling simple and start to feel complicated in a way she can't ignore. Over the course of the play, we see her innocence shift rather than just disappear. By the end, I was struck and moved by how visibly she and the Finch family had been altered by what they had just lived through.
Oscar Pearce's Bob Ewell reads unmistakably as evil on the surface, but the performance also suggests something more pathetic and more dangerous underneath: a deep, generational inferiority complex. Evie Hargreaves' Mayella accuses an innocent man to survive her father, which does not excuse her but does explain her. She is frightened, trapped and shaped by poverty, ignorance and a punitive religious household and that context makes her powerlessness legible without making her innocent. Andrea Davy's Calpurnia carries real moral weight, quietly checking Atticus even as she serves him. Her presence pushes against the comfort of his worldview and reminds the audience that his goodness has limits.
Aaron Shosanya plays Tom Robinson with restraint and dignity, but the direction does not always give him the stage presence the role demands. For a character who carries the moral wound of the play, Tom is too often made to fade into the symbolic. The production insists on his innocence, but does not give equal weight to his interiority. That is where the play's own limitations become visible: even as it critiques racial injustice, it still struggles to fully centre the Black man whose life is at stake.
It is a genuinely enjoyable play, filled with wry humour and great comedic timing, while remaining a morally serious evening that never lets the audience forget it is asking something of them. Its clearest lesson is that pacifism, politeness and process are not neutral when faced with a moral emergency. This To Kill a Mockingbird works because it does not simply ask us to admire Atticus Finch. It asks us to question whether being good, calm and reasonable is enough when the world requires something braver.
★★★★☆
By Koehun Aziz-Kamara
To Kill a Mockingbird is showing at Wyndham’s Theatre until 12 September
