To Kill a Mockingbird
- Robert Beale
- Jan 15
- 3 min read
Aaron Sorkin, after Harper Lee
Jonathan Church Theatre Productions
Lowry, Salford
January 13-24, 2026: 2 hrs 55 mins
(also at Sheffield Lyceum, January 27-February 7; Newcastle Theatre Royal, April 21-25; Liverpool Empire, May 12-16)
This new dramatisation of Harper Lee’s novel by Aaron Sorkin (of The West Wing and A Few Good Men fame) has the same plot line and characters as the book, but changes both the structure of the story and its significance – intending to make it more suitable for today’s audiences.
It’s still about a black man, Tom Robinson, untruthfully accused of raping a young white woman; about the principled lawyer Atticus Finch, who unsuccessfully defends him; about a small town society in 1930s segregationist Alabama riddled with racism, fear and hatred, and about the lawyer’s daughter, Scout, and her brother and friend, who see the whole episode through child eyes and learn a lot about adult behaviours in the process.
The production, directed by Bartlett Sher, opened on Broadway in 2018 and ran in the West End in 2022. Its tour began at Leeds Playhouse last autumn and is to visit a number of major theatres yet, with Richard Coyle reprising his role as Atticus Finch.
Coyle was unable to appear for press night at the Lowry and his place was taken by John J O’Hagan, who gave a magnificent performance, worthy of high praise in its own right.
The show will have packed houses and triumphant receptions wherever it goes, no doubt, and we all like to see wrongdoing avenged. Bob Ewell, the lying accuser of Tom Robinson and (as revealed by Atticus during the trial) incestuous abuser of his own daughter, is found by the powers-that-be, after he attacks the children but comes off worse thanks to intervention by silent recluse Boo Radley, to have “fallen on his own knife”. Sorry for the spoiler, but it’s in the book and Sorkin begins his play with the children discussing this very turn of events.
It's worth asking why we find non-judicial justice – the very thing Atticus Finch fought courageously against – to be in some way satisfying.
Sorkin assumes we all know the story anyway. Though the setting, both in time and in the setting based on the Monroe, Alabama, courthouse indelibly associated with it, is resolutely true to the original, the play thrusts us pretty well straight into the courtroom drama, illuminating its participants’ characters and credibilities by flashbacks. I think this is less effective than the original structure of building a picture by slow exposition before we get there.
He also injects today’s relevance by putting words into the mouths of the prejudiced white characters, taken from a present-day, right-wing US website – fair enough, some views have hardly changed – and gives Calpurnia, the black housekeeper to the motherless Finch family, more than one chance to put a point of view that would have gone unheard, though surely deeply thought, in 1930s Alabama. She (played by Andrea Davy) even has a “what???” straight out of Oprah Winfrey, and her getting preachy about “disrespecting” others feels rather too 21st Century.
But you can’t avoid the fact that the story is about white people and their ideas of justice. Tom Robinson gets shot 17 times for implausibly “trying to escape” when he’s in prison awaiting an appeal, and nothing compensates for that.
There are other high-quality performances, from Oscar Pearce as Bob Ewell, Stephen Boxer as Judge Taylor, James Mitchell as Link Deas, Andrea Davy as Mayella Ewell and Aaron Shosanya as Tom Robinson – and the children’s roles of Scout (Anna Munden), Jem (Gabriel Scott) and Dill (Dylan Malyn) are refreshingly good: they get many of the laugh lines, as there is a good measure of ironic humour in the script. Dylan Malyn, making his professional stage debut, creates a genuinely endearing character.
On the whole I think I prefer the previous and until now only licensed dramatisation of To Kill a Mockingbird, the Christopher Sergel play of 1970, which had Harper Lee’s blessing and has been seen in a variety of settings.
This version loses from putting the courtroom drama front and centre, consequently slowing in pace and lacking scenic coherence in its later stages, and at practically three hours it finally drags on too long. It’s ironic, too, that it has itself been the subject of legal tussles – first with the Harper Lee estate over its faithfulness to the book, and in 2019 with the promoters of a tour of the Sergel adaptation which Hollywood and Broadway producer Scott Rudin got called off.
More info and tickets here
