Advertisement

Culture Theatre

To Kill a Mockingbird

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD by Harper Lee, adapted by Christopher Sergel (Young Peoples Theatre, 165 Front East). Runs to November 2 see youngpeoplestheatre.ca for schedule. $15-$30. 416-862-2222. See listings. Rating: NNN

Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird is a classic, in large part because it’s a powerful story told in a simple yet compelling fashion.

The simplicity comes from the fact that it’s narrated by Scout (Caroline Toal), a pre-teen in 1935 Maycomb, Alabama whose world is changed when her father, Atticus Finch (Jeff Miller), defends Tom Robinson (Matthew G. Brown), a black man, on a rape charge brought by Mayella Ewell (Jessica Moss), a white woman, and her incendiary father, Bob (Hume Baugh).

The narrative also deals with the fascination Scout, her older brother, Jem (Noah Spitzer), and their friend Dill (Tal Shulman) have with their unseen neighbour, Boo Radley (Mark Crawford), who hides from the world and has become a bogey-man in the children’s imaginations. What starts out as a secondary plot becomes central to the main story the two share the “other” as a common theme.

There’s an admirable clarity in director Allen MacInnis’s production, one that captures not just the main storylines but also the emotional grip of small moments, like the father/son tension between Atticus and Jem and the portrait of Dill, who, in Shulman’s fine performance, comes to realize why Boo isolates himself.

Miller presents Atticus’s wisdom, warmth and decency without making him a sentimental figure, while Lisa Berry as Calpurnia, the Finches’ cook and surrogate mother, is tart and no-nonsense.

Baugh and Moss create strong figures, too, he as the representative of racism in this community and she as a woman who feels manipulated and victimized in several ways. Crawford nicely distinguishes his two different parts, first as the trial’s prosecuting attorney, whose language treats Tom Robinson as a guilty and inconsequential human being, and later as Boo, with his own ingenuous sense of what is right.

Toal communicates Scout’s childlike qualities as the innocent who asks legitimate but hard questions about the world around her, but Christopher Sergel’s adaptation doesn’t allow the actor much latitude to grow over the course of the play. Scout is like a sponge that swells with what she sees, hears and feels over the course of some six months, but Toal seems pretty much the same at the start and end of the show, and there’s a flatness to her final speech.

I’m sure it was a challenge for Young People’s Theatre to schedule this show for school audiences the script uses the “n” word and talks overtly about rape. But after an audible gasp at the word’s first use, the audience around me, in their early teens and younger, sat rapt for the nearly 90-minute show. Even the long and necessarily talky court scene held their attention. If you’ve ever sat in a show with young viewers, you know they’ll let you know quickly if they’re bored these kids clearly weren’t.

The quality of the storytelling alone is one reason why they listened so intently. But the Q&A after the show demonstrated that they realized that what they had just watched was more than a piece of history. Several students brought up the recent shootings of blacks in Ferguson and St. Louis they clearly felt the contemporary relevance of Lee’s engrossing tale.

Advertisement

Exclusive content and events straight to your inbox

Subscribe to our Newsletter

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

By signing up, I agree to receive emails from Now Toronto and to the Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions.

Recently Posted