Theatre reviews: To Kill a Mockingbird | Righ Iasgair: The Fisher King

To Kill A Mockingbird, Festival Theatre, Edinburgh ★★★★

Righ Iasgair: The Fisher King, Oran Mor, Glasgow ★★★

Standing up to evil is never as glamorous as fiction makes it sound; in the real world, it’s often terrifying, isolating and impoverishing. Yet it’s still difficult not to love Harper Lee’s terrific American classic To Kill A Mockingbird - published in 1960, set in the 1930s - in which southern small-town lawyer Atticus Finch, lovingly observed by his young daughter Scout, agrees to defend a black man who has been accused of raping a white woman; and the Festival Theatre was packed to the rafters, this week, for the first Edinburgh performances of Aaron Sorkin’s much-debated stage adaptation, first seen in New York in 2018.

Unlike Timothy Sheader’s acclaimed UK production a decade ago - famous for its beautifully dramatised reverence for the book - Sorkin’s version, written at the height of Donald Trump’s first term as President, has no intention of simply letting the story and its contemporary resonances speak for themselves.

Instead, it takes Lee’s narrative and crams it full of language from US politics in the age of Trump and MAGA. The raging racist and probable rapist Bob Ewell makes explicitly white supremacist speeches, talking of the great “replacement” ; his abused daughter Mayella echoes his politics. Atticus declares that for the white South, the raw wound of Civil War defeat is “only yesterday - always yesterday”; and at one point he grabs Ewell in an arm-lock, and tells him that if he feels inferior to educated liberals like him, it’s because he is inferior.

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What the play offers, in other words, is an explicit and frightening portrait of the huge gulfs of culture and understanding that divide Trump’s America, grafted onto a story which, two generations ago, explored those same tensions in a much gentler style; and if Sorkin does some violence to the quiet power of the original story, his version certainly makes for thrilling theatre, played to the hilt in Bartlett Sher’s fast-moving production, which features a totally committed cast of 20.

Understudy John J O’Hagan steps up brilliantly to the role of this reimagined Atticus; Anna Munden is an eloquent Scout. And there are also brilliant cameos from Stephen Boxer as a memorably exasperated Judge Taylor, and Andrea Davy, complex and demanding as Atticus’s black housekeeper Calpurnia, to complete a portrait of an America caught somewhere between the outright Jim Crow racism of the 30s, the Civil Rights optimism of the 60s, and the searing resurgent hatreds of the 2020s; but still clinging, in more hopeful moments, to the constitutional creed that once brought its people together, before the Trump wrecking-ball began its work.

In Kenny Boyle’s new Play, Pie Pint drama Righ Iasgair: The Fisher King, Effie (Oighrig) and Lexie (Leagsaidh) are two Hebridean girls hiking across a moor towards Lexie’s favourite loch, who also find that they have to face down a terrifying force of darkness. For 50 minutes or so, they walk and fish and try to retrace their steps, while quiet Lexie gradually reveals the truth about the huge challenge she is facing, while cheery and likeable Effie yells her head off at an impossibly high pitch.

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It’s obvious from the outset that the two are going to encounter something spooky and terrifying as darkness falls, if only so that they can defy it; and the encounter, when it comes, is both inarticulate and disappointingly anti-climactic.

In Lana Pheutan’s production, though, Fiona MacNeil as Lexie and MJ Deans as Effie deliver a touching pair of performances, exploring in a fine mix of English and Gaelic the lifelong friendship between them, and the love that will bind them, even through life’s worst challenges.

To Kill A Mockingbird is at the Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, until 25 October, and the King’s Theatre, Glasgow, 4-8 November. Righ Iasgair: The Fisher King is at Oran Mor, Glasgow, until 25 October, and the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, from 28 October until 1 November.

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