Review: TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, Wyndham's Theatre
Harper Lee's celebrated novel staged with all the emotional trimmings
Like many in the audience, my introduction to To Kill a Mockingbird was at school, a set book on the English Literature curriculum. If you don’t count Enid Blyton and Edward Ardizzone, it was pretty much my introduction to books full stop. Even at 14, I could feel the ruthless manipulation of my emotions, the set up and punch (to the solar plexus) and my complicity in it. Nearly 50 years on, this time on stage, I felt exactly like that again and, admittedly more guiltily, I liked it just as much. That's why it's a timeless work I suppose.
It’s the 1930s and we’re in an unapologetically racist Alabama - back in my 1970s classroom, we really thought that dragon would soon be put to sleep forever - where the upright lawyer, Atticus Finch, takes the case of Tom Robinson. He is a sharecropper accused of raping the teenage daughter of an alcoholic Klansman, Bob Ewell, a crime transparently committed by the father. Atticus has the case won, until a fatal misstep - more a defiant truth born in a sense of dignity really - explodes his strategy and... well, no spoilers if you're in the tiny minority who don't know what happens next.
Harper Lee’s masterstroke was to present her, let’s be honest, potboiler of a plot through the eyes of Scout, Jem and Dill. Anna Munden perfectly catches the tomboy’s sharp intelligence, fierce loyalty and fiercer bravery without ever resorting to syrupy sentimentality. Here is a very rare specimen in any narrative because Scout is a girl who boys wanted to be. Her innocent 360 degree charisma is even more critical onstage because there’s a lot of narrating to be done across the fourth wall and, without that acting and the bounce of Aaron Sorkin’s script, that technique gets old quickly.
Gabriel Scott has a tougher job with Jem, Scout’s older brother, who is desperate to become a mini-me of his father, so has far less to do, often playing straight man to their funny friend, Dill. Dylan Malyn makes a remarkable professional debut as the mysterious philosopher-fantasist, a kid brimming over with charm and humour but with a deep well of need inside, beautifully / cynically (you really can pick either adjective) constructed through the play.
Richard Coyle as Atticus Finch
Photo Credit: Johan Persson 
Richard Coyle’s Atticus, in his Tom Wolfe suit and with his Tom Wolfe accent, holds the centre narratively and morally, a believer in The Law, in the inherent goodness that can be found in every person and in putting in the hard work that goes into fostering the empathy that’s required to find it. Twenty or so years ago, one might have found him priggish or sanctimonious, but no longer. There’s a delicious pleasure to be had in seeing his rebuttal of every value (if that is the right word) that animates the MAGA movement - Atticus, once again, our champion and without the caveats that I might have voiced in the late 20th century.
It’s strange, certainly in 2026, to hear so few black voices and, it has to be said, witness some rather shallow characterisations of the community whose struggle is at the heart of one of the story’s main messages (it has a few). Aaron Shosanya brings a quiet stubbornness to Tom Robinson and you know, long before it happens, how he will react to the prosecuting counsel's (a splendidly oily Richard Dempsey) grandstanding goading. Andrea Davy does what she can with Calpurnia, Atticus’s housekeeper, but the part is a little too on the nose in foreshadowing the likes of Angela Davis, whose more radical resistance was still three decades in the future.
Over the three hours runtime, directed at a tremendous lick by Bartlett Sher assisted by Miriam Beuther’s slick set changes, you can feel yourself being moved about on a chessboard as the endgame approaches. Usually a critic, certainly this one, can step outside of such manoeuvring, look on with an objective eye and judge matters dispassionately. We're all a bit too cool for school - you have to be seeing as much as we do.
But not this time. I was as swept away as the rest of the house because, just sometimes, it’s nice to wallow in somebody else’s work, somebody else’s moral certainty, somebody else’s better world. Unlike poor Tom Robinson, I’m definitely guilty of that charge.
To Kill a Mockingbird is at Wyndham's Theatre until 12 September
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