Lyceum Theatre, Sheffield – until 7th February 2026
Reviewed by Lauren Fordham
5*****
‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ is Harper Lee’s timeless tale of racism, poverty and inequality in 1930s’ Alabama, where a black disabled man, Tom Robinson, (Aaron Shosanya) is falsely accused of raping a white woman, Mayella Ewell (Evie Hargreaves). He is defended by upstanding white lawyer Atticus Finch (Richard Coyle.) It is a story that feels familiar to many people around the world, whether from Lee’s 1960 novel or Robert Mulligan’s 1962 film starring Gregory Peck.
But in this play, writer Aaron Sorkin has torn up the novel and scattered common notions and emotions of the story – the idea of Finch as benevolent white saviour and Robinson and his fellow people of colour as grateful serfs – and tossed them away. This idea is physically represented in the structure of the play, as unlike the book, the telling of the story is not linear, for example it starts at the end of the story with Scout Finch, Atticus’s daughter (Anna Munden) proclaiming the conclusion that ‘Bob Ewell fell on his knife,’ and proceeds to tell the story via flashbacks. This is my only criticism of the play, to anyone unfamiliar with the plot, like my companion, it made the story somewhat more difficult to follow than if it had progressed chronologically.
Sorkin deserves praise for deliberately re-centring the principal characters of colour, Tom Robinson (Aaron Shosanya) and the Finch family’s maid, Calpurnia (Andrea Davy.) Gone is Reverend Sykes and his command of Scout, Jem and the people of colour at the trial to ‘stand up, [Atticus] is coming’ in grateful deference. Davy’s Calpurnia is a spitfire ready to ignite when her boss decides she isn’t sufficiently grateful for his work with her community, and Shosanya’s despairing dignity evokes John Coffey from Stephen King’s ‘The Green Mile’ as he relates his attempt to resist Mayella Ewell’s advances without ‘being ugly to her.’
Miriam Buether’s set effectively gives a strong sense of place, from the porch of the Finches’ house to the crowded courtroom, but I think the most powerful scenes are those when there is very little set at all, such as the scene when Atticus keeps vigil for Tom Robinson outside the Maycomb County jail, the stage almost empty save for his reading lamp. The stage being empty except for some bars at the top also effectively evokes Robinson’s bleak jail, and also Scout’s friend Dill’s.
I want to give praise here to Sorkin’s decision to expand and foreground the role of Dill, and to Dylan Malyn, who plays him. Malyn highlights his comic aspects but also his vulnerability when he weeps at the unfairness of Robinson’s fate, and tells Atticus how his mother locks him in his bedroom at home in Louisiana. He has a tender chemistry both with Coyle’s Atticus and also Simon Hepworth’s Link Deas, whose wife and mixed race child died as a consequence of segregated,racist and inferior healthcare. This was an aspect of the novel (in which it happens to town drunk Dolphus Raymond, rather than Link Deas) was one I had almost forgotten. It deserved more emphasis in the novel and subsequent adaptations as it is profoundly shocking and sobering, so I am pleased Sorkin’s play emphasises it. It also makes the audience reflect that perhaps Robinson and Boo Radley are not the only mockingbirds of the story.
The loss of Link Deas’ wife and mixed-race child to segregated, inferior healthcare strikes an emotional chord because even today despite the abandonment of segregation, or perhaps dispelling the White-washed illusion of racial equity, such deaths are not sad relics confined to the past either. The number of non-Hispanic Black women who die in childbirth today is 69.9 deaths per 100000 live births compared with 26.6 deaths per 100,000 live births for non-Hispanic White people.*
Far from the characters of colour being one-dimensional figures of passivity or pity, Calpurnia cannot restrain her anger at the ferociously disproportionate reaction when Robinson is shot trying to flee jail. She bemoans: ‘they shot a one-armed man 17 times.’ The resonance with the current and ongoing extra-judicial shooting of innocent people by USA Immigration and Customs Enforcement today is undeniable. The instruction by Judge Taylor to ‘All Rise,’ literally but also morally against injustices like that perpetrated against not only Tom Robinson, but real people like Keith Porter, Breonna Taylor and Alex Pretti, is a call to arms that we all must heed.