Understanding Aaron Sorkin’s To Kill A Mockingbird…

…and tracking the rise and fall of lily-livered liberalism

WARNING: This article includes plot spoilers…

I’m not sure there is a book in the world I know better than To Kill A Mockingbird. Like hundreds of thousands of British adults, Harper Lee’s classic was the source of months of anxiety as I crammed for my GCSE English exams back in the 90s. Our copies were bent and bedraggled, scrawled on with neon yellow highlighter, with teacher-fed lines like “Boo Radley as a metaphor” and “a lesson in our common humanity” squeezed into the margins.

More than two decades on, I can still quote the key lines; “You never really understand a person…until you climb in his skin and walk around in it.” We learned this book by rote; tracking the journey of the Finch family in small town Maycomb as the daughter Scout is initiated in the darker realities of the world of adults. From the racist trial and killing of Tom Robinson to encounters with morphine dependent, deeply prejudiced Mrs Debose, Mockingbird is the story of a wide-eyed child crossing a threshold: and finding herself confused by a world that’s less than ideal.

And yet, Mockingbird champions a very idealised kind of liberalism. From beginning to end we are served wisdom by Scout’s sage father Atticus, who repeats a single, central strategy for dealing with evil: the strategy of empathy. From ‘walking a mile in his shoes’ to ‘climbing into his skin,’ Atticus implores Scout (and therefore us) again and again to seek to understand the other side. “Most people are real nice,” he says on the final page, “when you finally see them.” This, the morning after a man has just tried to kill his daughter.

And so, while we explore injustice and prejudice on every page, Mockingbird is ultimately about the noble endeavor to understand rather than condemn. Atticus (and Harper Lee), want us to find peace in our communities by ultimately seeing the good in everyone.

Viewed through a 2022 lens, this instinct for empathy feels familiar. Hearing of some terrible news of any kind, I find myself reluctant to judge until I’ve done a good Google search of the person making the attack, to see if their actions can be explained somehow. Everyone has a story, we think. Everyone has good in them somewhere.

And at the same time, that urge to empathise also seems increasingly problematic. Whether it's Trumpism, Putinism, TERF-ism or the rise of White Supremacism, ‘seeing the other side’ also smacks of the privilege of someone not on the receiving end of the consequences. It has a generation of us now ill-equipped to challenge dangerous behaviour for fear of seeming unsympathetic to a perpetrator’s own struggle. It has us laxe, weak, slacking on the sidelines.

Which is probably why Aaron Sorkin decided to flip the script.

The vast majority of what you see in the West End’s latest hit show is pretty true to the novel. Courtroom drama, early teenage hijinks. Rafe Spall playing the noble prosecutor Atticus wearing a beige linen suit. But with some shifts in characterisation and dialogue, Sorkin tries to give Harper Lee’s text a subtle, yet fundamental 2022 upgrade.

One of the biggest examples of this is in how Sorkin expands the role of Calpurnia, the Finch family’s black cook and quasi-mother to Scout and Jem. In Sorkin’s Mockingbird, Cal is a near constant witness to the injustices of Maycomb, and in merging her role with that of Atticus’ sister Alexandra in the book, she gets a whole lot more dialogue to whip Atticus into a deeper awareness of how corrosive and evil racism is.

More importantly, she’s the main challenger to Atticus’ (and Harper Lee’s) insistence that ‘everyone is nice, really’. At multiple points in the play, she reminds us in no uncertain terms that while this might seem well-meaning, it is also a huge FU to a black community who bear the scars of that injustice we’re trying so hard to understand. “As you try to respect everyone,” she says, “notice who you are disrespecting in doing so.” (or something to this effect — I can’t find the script online).

I get the sense that Sorkin is inching towards making Cal, rather than Atticus, the sage and star of this play. Rafe Spall’s Atticus is slightly strange to behold, embodying little of the quiet, deep goodness that characterises his demeanor in the book. Instead, he flips between just two gears — fun-time single dad and shouty bombastic courtroom prosecutor, with minimal range in-between. We see little of his internal struggle or gentle wisdom, and Sorkin’s relentless dialogue makes him more Josh from The West Wing than the deep thinking, ultra-moral character in Lee’s story.

Cal, by contrast, is the play’s true conscience. She is only one to weep for Tom Robinson’s death, the only one to argue that it was right that Atticus’ kids stood up to the racist neighbour down the road, the only one to ask “how many times did they shoot him? SEVENTEEN TIMES.”

But here, Sorkin backs off. In the curtain call, it’s Spall’s Atticus given centre stage. A move that feels off for a play about racism. I can’t help but feel that it would have been more right, more true, to have centred the greater wisdom of the play’s only black woman in that final moment, rather than default to celebrating the ultimately faltering attempts at decency from the middle aged white man.

In the play’s last scene however, Sorkin doesn’t pull his punches. In the book, that final dialogue between Scout and Atticus is all about empathy, closing with that now infamous “when you finally see them” line. On the stage, the call is different. Rather than implore us towards mutual understanding, Sorkin is determined to inspire us towards allyship. “All Rise,” Scout shouts our way.

Viewing the book with a 2022 eye, I can’t help but wonder how much this novel was, for us 90s Gen X kids, a big influence in forming our insatiable desire for mutual understanding. I look back on my GCSE copy and I can see how thoroughly and deeply I consumed this text. I can still quote whole sections by heart. I remember my heart drinking in its message — don’t fight, don’t judge, always try to walk a mile in the other person’s shoes.

And I wonder if that lesson has hamstrung us now. For a decade or more, our generation has been left bewildered when it comes to actually standing up to tyranny or prejudice. “That’s awful,” we say, usually on social media or with a placard in hand. And then we look to understand where the other side is coming from: whether its mental illness, or a troubled childhood, or some previous harm incurred. I wonder how much damage we allow people to do while we relentlessly seek to understand. I wonder who incurs that damage.

Because, speaking as a middle class white woman in liberal London, it’s rarely us.

Overall, I liked what Sorkin did with Mockingbird. The reframe towards action over understanding felt on-point; and the upweighting of the play’s few black characters was both welcomed, and overdue. But it also felt just a little uncomfortable: watching a predominantly white cast teaching a white saviour sensibility to a predominantly white audience. While we can’t fully rewrite the stories of the past, we can choose which ones we spotlight now.

As it was, Sorkin did at least challenge us not to just sit back and empathise.

I just hope we got the message.

All rise.