To Kill a Mockingbird – Assistant Director’s Blog 2

Dis/orderly Conduct

Having gone through the whole play, this week has seen a busy and fertile rehearsal room. There has been a great deal of analytical housework. Ironing out key scenes. Cleaning up sections of blocking (the positions of the actors on stage) and working to push the narrative so that the story reaches you effectively, with both power and heart.

What I am going to do is pick out one scene in particular. The scene I’ve chosen for you is probably the most well known in the play, book and film: The trial scene. In many ways, both obvious and not so obvious, it tells the whole story.

A packed courtroom: the tension building, building and building because of the mass of bodies, the humidity and the raging sun. This is a snapshot of Maycomb. The Negroes are sitting in the coloured balcony, the whites in the pews below. Everyone is looking intently at a wrongly convicted man, his accusers, his defender, and an all-white jury.

There has been much criticism and sifting of evidence to suggest that the Tom Robinson trial is based on the Scottsboro Trial – one of the most infamous cases in American legal history. It also took place in the 1930s. It also involved African American defendants, who were dubiously accused of rape. It seems bizarre, in today’s tolerant society, that such wrongs could have ever taken place. However, when you consider the socio-economic context, it becomes a little easier to believe. People were scared. America was going through the Great Depression. In cities across the USA, there were long breadlines, as people struggled to find work and feed their families. Many people lived in squalor and poverty. It also resulted in ferocious rivalry, as people fought tooth and nail to protect what they perceived as “theirs” by right. People were set in their ways, and anything new frightened them. Anything new was a menace to the established order of things.

In a sleepy little town like Maycomb, a black man visiting a white woman, and then doing chores for no charge would have certainly caused unrest. It is worth asking how each and every character would have reacted to this.

So what goes wrong in the judicial process? Who is connecting with whom? Who has got their story straight? Damian Cruden urges Robin Simpson, Mark White, Clare Corbett and Andy Hockley (Gilmer, Bob Ewell, Mayella and Heck Tate) to take a moment to work out what actually happened. We only hear what they attest to be the truth, but what’s behind the façade? What happened between Mayella and Bob Ewell once Tom Robinson had fled the scene? What did Bob Ewell say to Heck Tate when he ran to fetch him? What did Heck Tate find when he got to the Ewell’s house? There needs a knowledge of the “truth”, in order for their fabrications to be seen as such. In order for their version of events to be implausible, in order for Atticus to pick them apart.

For me, this is a key idea in To Kill a Mockingbird – this notion of codes and laws. There are two rulebooks in Maycomb. One contains the statutory (“written”, if you like) laws that people are supposed to live by. It soon becomes clear however that these laws: written in longhand, in black fountain pen on white paper, might as well be in invisible ink. For there are also unwritten rules, taken from a shadier playbook, written in grey ink. These are the laws which people actually operate under. The two laws often contradict each other. This never changes, even after Atticus’ ground-breaking summation. As we reach the end of the play, Heck Tate is still the Sheriff and rightly or wrongly, he is still prepared to bend the rules.

I would just like to say a big thank you to the Friends of York Theatre Royal. On Wednesday they paid us a visit, and played the part of our jury superbly. Your participation and enthusiasm was greatly appreciated.

JRW