HARPER LEE’S TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD
Gielgud Theatre until November 19 Tickets: 0344 482 5151
The title is misleading. This is not Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird but Aaron Sorkin’s version. Rafe Spall takes on the role of small-town lawyer Atticus Finch, immortalised on screen by Gregory Peck.
He is a decent, single father of Scout (Gwyneth Keyworth) and Jem (Harry Redding) who observe and comment on their father’s defence of Tom Robinson (Jude Owusu) who is on trial for the rape of a white woman.
Robinson is innocent but, in the American south of the 1930s, an accused black man is a dead black man.
By focusing on the trial itself, Sorkin cuts to the chase, jettisoning the context and reducing it to a few smart lines about US history. The American Civil War, he says, did not occur 70 years earlier but ‘yesterday’ to many white Southerners. We lose the subtle nuances of smalltown America, along with the novel’s theme of childhood innocence slowly eroded.
Sorkin also reframes Atticus Finch’s belief that there is goodness to be found in everyone (even appalling racists) as a form of arrogance, which black housekeeper Calpurnia (Pamela Nomvete) challenges.
There is much good work here. The two principal black characters, Robinson and Calpurnia, have been augmented. Robinson’s dignified fatalism contrasts well with Calpurnia’s suppressed anger at Finch’s wishy-washy liberalism. Both Jim Norton’s Judge Taylor and Lloyd Hutchinson’s town drunk Link Deas are fully formed human beings.
Miriam Buether’s abandoned factory set, with courtroom furniture and Finch’s front porch flown in and out, reeks of Depression-era poverty. More problematic is the sidelining of the mysterious Boo Radley and the caricature of abuser/racist Bob Ewell (Patrick O’Kane). People are not born with racist views, as Oscar Hammerstein III wrote in South Pacific (“You’ve got to be taught/To hate/And fear...”). While it is a solid, conventional production, the eagerness to appear à la mode diminishes its source material.
GYLES BRANDRETH: BREAK A LEG ★★★★ Leicester Square Theatre (UK tour until July 3) Tickets: gylesbrandreth.net
I have tried to resist Gyles Brandreth. That plummy delivery, the self-satisfied smirk, the terrible sweaters are all designed to trigger my gag reflex. But he won me over within five minutes of walking on-stage.
Like a British Roddy McDowell, he knows everyone in the world.
His one-man show allows him to drop names with shameless abandon, followed by an outrageous anecdote that he swears is true.
His only props are a table with an old-fashioned radio, a water bottle and the skull from his first Hamlet production. He does a passable Noel Coward impersonation, revels in nostalgia of early television programmes, recounts stories of drunk actors, naughty actors and ageing actors. He totters across the stage as a 90-year-old Dame Sybil Thorndike.
His description of Ann Widdecombe as a cross between Danny DeVito and Margaret Rutherford had me in stitches, his duet with June Whitfield’s recorded voice had me in tears. Brandreth is a cross between Peter Ustinov and Barry Humphries.
Resistance is futile.