No sweltering on the porch, no scuppernongs, no pickled pigs knuckles. Above all, no real sense of the simultaneous strangeness and closeness of other people. Director Bartlett Sher’s production of Harper Lee’s enthralling novel To Kill a Mockingbird arrives on gusts of Broadway success and tides of right thinking. It has a strong central performance by Rafe Spall, full of modest conviction as the white lawyer Atticus Finch, and a blazing one from Patrick O’Kane as a Klan-leaning bully. Nevertheless, this is a thin, often awkward evening. More of an argument than an experience.
Aaron Sorkin’s “new play” puts the courtroom drama, in which Finch defends a black workman against a trumped-up charge of rape, centre stage from the outset. It is the framework of the entire evening rather than the culmination of exclusions and longstanding tribalism. For the first time ever, a design by the great Miriam Buether kept me apart from the action rather than plunging me into it: courtroom, homestead and jail are by turns perched in a bleak grey warehouse. The sense of an inbred township in which families can identify traits down generations – “every third Merriweather is morbid” – is missing, visually and verbally. In Lee’s novel, fragrance and fury make a poisonous mixture: ladylike white women fanning their prejudices as they sip their tea are the dainty version of the men who gather together in hoods ready to lynch. The sense of group pressure would add dramatic force: the stage is often underpopulated, not least in the court scene (compare the milling crowds of the Gregory Peck film!) where spectators don’t lean expectantly into the action but are corralled into a small space like quizzical budgerigars.
