Reviews 2018
Reviews 2018
✭✭✭✭✩
by Christopher Sergel, directed by Nigel Shawn Williams
Stratford Festival, Festival Theatre, Stratford
June 2-November 8, 2018
Atticus: “There’s a lot of ugly things in this world, son. I wish I could keep 'em all away from you. That's never possible”
Christopher Sergel’s 1987 stage adaptation of the novel To Kill a Mockingbird receives an outstanding production at the Stratford Festival. The entire cast is strong, especially the three remarkable child actors who play so central a role in the action. Nigel Shawn Williams directs with great sensitivity and understanding. It would be nice to think that Harper Lee’s portrait of what racism was like in the the South in the 1930s has dated, but the shame is that her depiction of racism is still so keenly relevant today.
Harper Lee’s novel was published in 1960 and the iconic film adaptation released in 1962. The narrator of the novel has two voices – one of the Jean Louise Finch called “Scout” aged 6 to 8 years old and one of her adult self looking back on the events of 1933-35 in the fictional town of Maycomb, Alabama. The stage adaptation is a memory play that divides Scout into two characters, her younger and her older self, the latter recalling the events of her youth that the younger self enacts. As director, Nigel Shawn Williams has taken the bold, brilliant move of shifting the time in which the older Scout lives from 1960 to 1968.
This shift allows Williams to begin the play with projections on the walls of the Festival stage of photos from the civil rights movement, of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., of lynchings and of the “Whites Only” signs of the period. Designer Denyse Karn has dressed Irene Poole, who plays Older Scout, like a university student of the 1960s. These changes give the effect that the racial turbulence of the 1960s is the reason that leads Older Scout to remember her first encounter with racism as a little girl. This has the great advantage not only of placing the fictional events of the 1930s in context but in making Older Scout a stronger bridge between the audience, many of whom will have experienced the events of 1968 – 50 years ago this year – and the action of the play.
Sergel has condensed the action from three years to just one, the year 1935. The story is primarily about how the young Scout (Clara Poppy Kushnir) and her brother Jem (Jacob Skiba) come to realize that Atticus Finch (Jonathan Goad), the boring, bookish man who is their father, is actually a kind of hero. When Finch takes on the hopeless cause of defending a black man against a charge of the rape of a white woman, the children are angry about the constant taunts they receive in school. Yet, once they witness the trial and see the truth of the matter, they recognize the courage of their father who is willing to fight for justice against the town’s endemic prejudice.
There is an inherent tediousness to plays in which narrators simply watch the events unfold that they have narrated. This, indeed, is how the play was last staged at Stratford in 2007. Williams seems to be quite aware of this and therefore makes the Older Scout of Irene Poole into a kind of stage manager of the action. He has her usher in the characters in Act 1 and pause them while she fills us in on their background. With a sweeping gesture Older Scout can clear the stage and signal that a new scene should begin.
Jonathan Goad is certainly a younger, less charismatic Atticus Finch than is Gregory Peck in the film – but then Peck’s was an inimitable performance. Goad also does not radiate the same warmth and complexity of feeling that Peter Donaldson did in the role in 2007. Nevertheless, Goad succeeds in presenting Finch as an extraordinary yet humble, mild-mannered man who deliberately shuns acclaim and hides his gallant past in order to appear like any ordinary, rational man to other people including his children.
At intermission and after the show, everyone seems to be talking about how wonderful the child actors are. They do so with good reason. The children are wonderful. Clara Poppy Kushnir is a delight as the 9-year-old Scout, a mouthy tomboy who says whatever is on her mind. Her standout scene is where she recklessly addresses Walter Cunningham Sr. (John Kirkpatrick) clad in his KKK regalia and by establishing a human bond banishes the group mentality that had led to his joining a lynch mob. Scout doesn’t understand Walter’s purpose but her innocent questioning believably shatters his evil intent.
Jacob Skiba gives a very perceptive performance as Scout’s older brother Jem. He shows us Jem’s naive side in his fantastic imaginings about what their unseen neighbour Boo Radley might look like, but he is especially good at showing Jem’s natural protectiveness towards Scout so that the two really do seem like brother and sister. Hunter Smalley is effective as Dill, a young boy who is supposed to be visiting his aunt but clearly finds the company of Scout and Jem more exciting. Not only are the children’s performances completely natural, but all three maintain their deep Southern accents throughout the play.
Other fine performances include Sophia Walker as Atticus Finch’s housekeeper, cook and nanny Calpurnia. Walker – young, fit and non-deferential – avoids any of the clichés associated with such a role. Her worries about the children are because her job has made her de facto their surrogate mother. Matthew G. Brown gives a heart-breaking performance as Tom Robinson, the man falsely accused of assault and rape. In his testimony at the trial he portrays a roiling mixture of contrary emotions. He desires to tell the truth, but hesitates to tell all the truth at once knowing the negative effect it will have on his accuser and the disbelief that will greet it in court.
Tim Campbell makes the liberal sheriff Heck Tate much more of a presence than is usually the case. Campbell shows us that Tate upholds the law but is acutely aware of its unfairness toward Black people and that justice is not always done in court. Marion Adler is so effective as the unpleasant old woman Mrs. Dubose, that we, along with Jem, have to learn why Finch treats her with respect. Michelle Giroux, who happens to have played Older Scout at Stratford in 2007, gently plays Miss Maudie who helps the children believe that there is hope to be found in even the darkest situation, unlike the spiteful Stephanie Crawford well played by Jacklyn Francis. Though he has very few minutes on stage, Rylan Wylie as Boo Radley creates a sensitive portrait of a recluse whose method of dealing with a cruel world, unlike Finch’s is to retreat from it entirely.
The cruelty of the world is fully embodied by Randy Hughson as Bob Ewell, violent in actions and crude in thought and speech. Hughson’s depiction of Ewell is so intense one can almost smell the stench of hatred wafting from him. The notion of presenting him as completely bald is a clever way of relating this racist of 1935 to the skinheads of the present. Jonelle Gunderson’s portrayal of Ewell’s daughter Mayella, who claims that Tom Robinson raped her, is a pathological study of a desperate young woman who has been systematically abused and tries ineffectively to conceal her fear with outward defiance.
This powerful production of To Kill a Mockingbird deserves the widest possible audience. The tragedy, of course, is that those who need to see the play most will stay away. Nevertheless, those who do see it should feel newly encouraged to effect what changes they can to prevent the forces of intolerance and bigotry from wielding the power they once had and in too many cases still have.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Irene Poole as Older Scout in green and blue, Jonathan Goad in white as Atticus Finch, Matthew G. Brown as Tom Robinson and the company; Irene Poole as Older Scout, Clara Poppy Kushnir as Younger Scout and Jonathan Goad as Atticus Finch; Hunter Smalley as Dill and Jacob Skiba as Jem. ©2018 David Hou.
For tickets, visit www.stratfordfestival.ca.
2018-06-04
To Kill a Mockingbird