To Kill a Mockingbird director Bartlett Sher: ‘Theatre is not about wrong and right’  

It’s one of the most famous scenes in screen history: Gregory Peck, playing Atticus Finch, the small-town 1930s lawyer in the 1962 film of To Kill a Mockingbird, packs up his papers at the end of the trial in which he has defended, in vain, an innocent black man. As he silently walks beneath the courtroom balcony where the town’s black population have looked on, they rise to give him a standing ovation. “Miss Jean Louise, stand up,” says Reverend Sykes to Finch’s daughter. “Your father’s passin’.”

It’s hard to watch — or to read in Harper Lee’s original novel — and keep a dry eye. But that scene is absent from Aaron Sorkin’s recent dramatisation of the story, which is about to open in London’s West End, with Rafe Spall as Atticus. Its excision is key to this version’s approach, says leading American director Bartlett Sher when he steps out of rehearsals in south London to discuss the show.  

“We’re very careful not to have that in there,” says Sher, whose Broadway staging was nominated for a Tony Award. “I think if there’s a flaw to the film, it’s that Gregory Peck made it too much a white saviour story: he made it too much about him. And I don’t think that’s true of the book. There’s a kind of journey to the book which we experience now which is more embedded in our story.”

The immense status of Lee’s beloved 1960 novel is what makes it so important both to stage and to examine, he adds. It’s a cornerstone of the 20th-century literary canon: a moving story of three young children — Scout, Jem and Dill — in 1930s Alabama encountering the truth about racism, injustice and the law. As Sher points out, it’s a work synonymous for many with their own childhood and their awakening awareness of the deep injustices of the world. “It’s so critical to the moral development of kids and how they understand about justice and change.”

There’s a David-and-Goliath charge to the tale of one man trying to take on his community’s entrenched racism, with Lee depicting 1930s attitudes from the perspective of the 1950s. But telling a story about racial injustice solely through the eyes of the white characters lands very differently in 2022 — particularly on stage, where the roles of the black characters stand out.

Sorkin’s script gives greater voice to both Tom Robinson, the defendant, and Calpurnia, the family’s housekeeper. Crucially, they question Atticus’s faith in the fundamental goodness of human nature. Calpurnia becomes a vital counterbalance to Atticus, challenging his insistence that the children empathise with everyone — even violent white supremacist Bob Ewell. When Atticus responds that it’s going to take time for the people of Maycomb to change, her response is cutting: “How much time would Maycomb like?”

That’s a line that rings out for an audience watching in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and the Black Lives Matter movement. The intention, says Sher, is to combine great respect and affection for Lee’s classic with a framework that appraises afresh the questions about race, class, compromise and tolerance, creating a dialogue, for the audience, between then and now.

“It’s a piece that seeks to understand who we are now, based on who we used to be. It’s set in 1934; she wrote it in the late ’50s; we are here now in 2022 — we have a conversation going on.” 

It’s OK to be idealistic. It’s OK to believe in the system to work properly. It’s OK to have faith in something bigger than yourself

In Sorkin’s script, that spirit of examination is built into the very structure of the drama. While the novel includes a leisurely unfolding of the children’s long, hot summers and their obsession with mysterious recluse Boo Radley, the play plunges us swiftly into the trial and shifts back and forth in time from there. Here the three children introduce the story, quibbling over details as they pull the events of the past back into an empty warehouse that could be seen as a metaphor for memory and for, as Sher puts it, “where America is now”. 

That’s partly sensible stagecraft, says the director: “It is built around the experience of the trial because that’s the seminal event in the young kids’ lives.” 

But it’s also a move that embraces the overlaps between a courtroom and a theatre — the drama, the competing narratives, the public who must judge the truth — and puts the tale’s scrutiny of law and justice literally centre stage. Audiences can set Atticus’s mistaken hope that justice might stare down racism against their own experience of a period that has brought the future of democracy itself into question. Working with a UK cast, Sher adds, has brought another layer of history to the dilemmas in the piece.

“[Atticus] is a guy who takes on a case and believes he’s going to be able to defend him and help,” says Sher. “It’s OK to be idealistic. It’s OK to believe in the system to work properly. It’s OK to have faith in something bigger than yourself.  

“I think we have to believe. But it’s the big question, isn’t it? How much do our laws matter? Is democracy as established by a bunch of white men in the 18th century still viable under these conditions? Does it matter? Does it evolve? Does it transform? Does it suit who we are? Can we use it?” 

Sher is a man who relishes a knotty problem. His conversation races with his thoughts, his lunchtime salad often coming a poor second to his energetic interrogation of a topic. His career is peppered with award-winning productions of plays that grapple with huge moral issues, including Oslo, JT Rogers’s riveting drama about the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks in 1993.

Acclaimed revivals of popular musicals South Pacific, The King and I and My Fair Lady have balanced their progressive thinking for their period with expectations now. His Lincoln Center Theater staging of My Fair Lady (arriving at London’s ENO in May) tilts the ending to bring it back in line with Shaw’s original play, Pygmalion.

“Some audiences were very upset that we changed the musical,” he says. “But the musical had already changed the play. So we just changed it back. It’s good: it creates conversation.” 

Reappraising much-loved classics can raise hackles, of course: such shows often hold a special place for audiences. But for Sher, that is precisely the reason to keep assessing them. Alongside staging new voices, he argues, it’s vital to keep telling and interrogating familiar stories.

“Theatre is not about wrong and right,” he says. “It’s often about two rights. It’s the job of theatre to present complex situations in which audiences have to see their own history, understand their own past, make decisions about where they want to be today. It’s not our job to argue for them and tell them what to think, but to constantly return, to keep addressing those questions through reinvestigating history and seeing it in a new way. That’s an ongoing exploration over time with each generation.” 

‘To Kill a Mockingbird’, Gielgud Theatre, London from March 10, tokillamockingbird.co.uk; ‘My Fair Lady’, London Coliseum, May 7-August 27, eno.org