Unfinished business as Richard Coyle back on stage in To Kill A Mockingbird

He sensed it was still unfinished business in an important double first in his career – the first time he has returned to a role and the first time he has toured. Dates along the way include March 24-28 at the Mayflower Theatre, Southampton, a revival of the seminal American novel about racial injustice and childhood innocence. Oscar winning writer Aaron Sorkin's stage adaptation is paired with Bartlett Sher’s direction.

Richard is thrilled to go back to it: “It’s a gut punch of a play. It is funny and it is devastating. I read the book as a teenager, and it was a huge inspiration to me. It was the book I needed. Books mattered to me. They really did. Books were my safe place, my refuge, and this particular book meant so much. It was a kind a magical thing. It was just a magical effect that it had on me as a teenager. I think it helped me work out who I am and I think I just looked up to the figure of Atticus as being a distant paradigm of something. He was a kind of hero. I very much liked some of the other characters but especially Atticus. I read the book for pleasure and I think a lot of things I was experiencing as I read them, it was the first time that I was experiencing them, things like a sense of justice and a deep morality and a sense of what is right and wrong. The way it's presented in the book is just so powerful. It feels very compassionate. There is a real integrity to it that is fundamental and that I have tried to have in my life. It has been quite instrumental in shaping who I have wanted to be in life.”

But there is another side to Atticus as well. In 2015 Harper Lee released the book Go Set a Watchman which was actually written before To Kill A Mockingbird but was then shelved.

“Mockingbird is an idealistic picture of a father from a daughter’s point of view. Watchman is the same daughter as a grown woman revisiting her father years later having spent time in New York. This production has combined the two Atticuses. Watchman was written before Mockingbird and when it was published it caused a massive stink for people. For so long people had felt that Atticus was this saviour figure but in Watchman it is a much more mixed portrait of a white father and a moderate. I guess he felt paternalistic but the father in Watchmen gives time to the white extremists.”

As Richard says, Aaron Sorkin understood that Atticus couldn't just be a white saviour and a child-like hero: “Instead he captured a very complicated and nuanced man. You have the sense of justice which pervades the man but you've also got something very complicated. One of the journeys in the play is that it is an identity crisis for Atticus.”