TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD
Open Air Theatre, Regent's Park, London NW1
Opened 22 May, 2013
***

Irrespective of the quality of the shows, this weak, late spring is not an accommodating season for open-air theatre. Timothy Sheader has done prime work in Regent’s Park over the last few summers, programming big cash-cow musicals beside comparatively adventurous productions in terms of the venue, but even the Hollywood name of Robert Sean Leonard as Atticus Finch in Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird cannot warm an audience through two and three-quarter chilly hours.
    
If the weather approaches seasonal norms, things may fare better. Lee’s novel is a firm favourite, combining as it does adult decency with golden childhood, and in a political climate given to the demonization of entire social groups its refusal to knuckle under serves as a valuable corrective. Leonard, too, is in the kind of role which has been his long suit since youth: quiet but resolute on the side of right. Atticus’ defence of the “Negro” Tom Robinson on a charge of rape of a white woman may be doomed to failure in 1935 Alabama, but we all identify with his young son Jem in that it seems inconceivable that his arguments could be ignored.
    
Sheader’s production is appropriately low-key: the opening narration begins amid the audience, with several supporting performers seeded amongst us dressed in contemporary mufti and using their own accents; they don period costume and southern drawls only when shifting into character. Jon Bausor’s design keeps the stage almost bare save for a tree from which hangs, in the first half, a motor-tyre swing (period tyres, too!) and in the second, an empty but menacing noose. If the other two rotating rosters of young performers playing Jem, Dill and the narrator-figure Scout are as fine as the one we saw on press night, there can be no criticism on that score either. And speaking of scores, Phil King accompanies the action sensitively in a folksy vein on guitars and harmonica.
    
The timing of dusk means that the first, largely establishing, act is played in what is made to appear natural light, with the second, courtroom phase under obviously electric lighting. It suggests that we are, or should be, by now on board for the real drama. Yet, in this weather, we prove less apt to wander towards the world of the play during the first half. It needs to compel us, and Lee’s way – respected by Sheader – is modest charm rather than compulsion.

Written for the Financial Times.

Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights reserved.

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