To Kill a Mockingbird was for decades widely taught as a parable of racial injustice and moral courage. Sixty-six years after Harper Lee published it, the questions surrounding the book are more complicated: whose story it tells, whose interior life it neglects, what to make of Atticus Finch, and what a modern audience should do with language intended to make them recoil.
The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961, but its place in the classroom has become increasingly contested. The American Library Association has recorded challenges relating not only to racial slurs, but to the novel’s treatment of Black experience and what some critics regard as its positioning of Atticus as a “white-saviour figure”.
Theo Hatzistergos chose to direct it anyway.
For Hatzistergos, who directed Christopher Sergel’s stage adaptation for Sydney’s Genesian Theatre Company this year, one of the earliest questions was also one of the most difficult: what, if anything, should a contemporary production do with the racial language of the original text?
“I can’t tell you how many people were, before the production, telling me, ‘Are you really sure you want to use this language in the play? Are you thinking about at least cutting it down somewhat?’”
His answer was unequivocal.
“I said, ‘No, no, we’re not doing any of that.’”
There was also a practical consideration. Hatzistergos says the licensing conditions did not permit the company to alter the script without approval from the rights holders. But that did not settle the larger question. Even had the choice been entirely his, he believed removing the language would diminish what the work was asking an audience to confront.
“I just think it’s wrong to take out [the language],” he says. “It’s not just a script or a story that’s about racial injustice and the triumph of the human spirit in the face of fear and that sort of thing. It’s also historical. It reflects the period the story is depicting.”
The offensiveness of the language was not incidental to his reading of the play. It was part of its effect.
“It was about allowing the audience to feel how confronting it was,” Hatzistergos says. “To feel uncomfortable.” He admits the decision gave him pause.
“I was very, very timid about it at first,” he says. “But I thought, no, this is how we’re going to do it.”
That commitment to discomfort extended beyond the words themselves.
Hatzistergos pushed the action beyond the conventional limits of the stage, with actors moving through the auditorium and the audience drawn physically into Maycomb. The fictional Alabama town, with its racial hierarchy, class divisions, domestic violence and deeply embedded assumptions about whose testimony could be trusted, was no longer contained at a comfortable distance.
“I thought it was important for people to really understand what that felt like,” he says, “to make them feel that they were immersed and a part of that community.”
The decision gave Tom Robinson’s trial a different proximity. The audience was not simply watching a jury weigh the word of a Black man against that of a white woman in 1930s Alabama. It was sitting within the community that had already decided the relative value of those voices.
Hatzistergos was equally interested in what surrounded the courtroom: the poverty of the Ewell family, Mayella’s treatment at the hands of her father, the social position of Calpurnia and the way prejudice became ordinary enough to pass almost without comment.
The Genesian production ran from 29 May to 4 July in Rozelle, with Hatzistergos directing Sergel’s adaptation of Lee’s novel. The theatre itself warned audiences that the production contained racially explicit language and themes, sexual abuse and violence.
For a work so heavily embedded in popular culture, Hatzistergos approached it with an unusual degree of deliberate isolation.
He had seen parts of the celebrated 1962 film, but resisted immersing himself in previous productions and interpretations. Gregory Peck’s Atticus Finch remains one of the character’s defining incarnations, winning Peck the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1963.
Hatzistergos had no interest in reproducing Peck’s interpretation.
“I don’t like to watch past productions and things like that or read the book,” he says. “I just wanted to have my own perspective on it.”
He describes this as one of his “director’s quirks”. He limits his exposure to the news, keeps some distance from social media and is wary of allowing the accumulated opinions around a work to settle too deeply into his thinking.
With To Kill a Mockingbird, Peck was the unavoidable reference.
“I kept hearing about [Gregory Peck’s performance], and I thought, I don’t want it to be like that. I want it to be my own version.”
There is confidence in that position, particularly given that To Kill a Mockingbird was only his second production as a director. His first, Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Nile, was staged at the Genesian in 2024 after several years in which Hatzistergos had primarily worked as an actor and assistant director.
The two productions could hardly be more different in subject. Christie offers a tightly engineered murder mystery, built on secrets, money, jealousy and misdirection. Lee’s work asks an audience to sit with something less easily resolved. Yet Hatzistergos talks about both in terms that reveal an emerging preoccupation with what space can do to an audience.
In Murder on the Nile, confinement was useful. The action remained largely within the public parlour of a river steamer, intensifying the claustrophobia as suspicion accumulated among the passengers.
With To Kill a Mockingbird, he worked in the opposite direction. He broke the frame open.
What changed most between the two productions, however, was not necessarily his taste in material. It was his understanding of what a director needs from the people around him.
“I learned a lot from the first one,” he says. “I just knew I needed to be organised and I needed people that I could trust.”
What followed was not some elaborate theory of theatre-making. Hatzistergos became more interested in preparation, communication and assembling people whose judgement he could trust.
“I do take a collaborative approach,” he says, describing the process as “shining a light on what everybody does well” and allowing people to lean into their particular strengths.
It is a philosophy that owes as much to Hatzistergos’s life outside the theatre as it does to what happens inside one.
Professionally, he works in business banking. He does not regard the distance between finance and theatre as particularly great. Both involve people, pressure, organisation and the consequences of poor communication.
“There’s things that you can sort of correlate in the corporate finance world and there’s things that you can take out of the art and then sort of implement,” he says.
When a production begins to go wrong, he says, it can deteriorate quickly.
“Eighty per cent of it is just organisation. And, you know, knowing what you want and having… a good team and a good cast.”
One of his more unexpected influences comes not from theatre, but rugby league.
Hatzistergos talks admiringly about Wayne Bennett, particularly the veteran coach’s ability to simplify what he asks of people.
“That’s something that I said sort of the first days to my team,” he says. “‘I don’t want to complicate things. It just needs to be simple. This is what we’re trying to do. This is what I’m looking for.’ And they just executed brilliantly.”
It is an interesting contrast with the work itself. To Kill a Mockingbird is culturally complicated; Hatzistergos did not believe the process of making it needed to be.
For Hatzistergos, clarity is more useful than complexity.
“I just take the view that I want to simplify things and make it easy for everyone to understand.”
The production was mounted within the constraints of community theatre, with roughly six to eight weeks between auditions and performance. Hatzistergos speaks about those limitations without apology. If anything, they have sharpened his respect for the people working within them.
“You don’t get that luxury, unfortunately, as you would with professional productions,” he says. “It’s basically a testament to the people that are working within or behind the scenes, the fact that they can get a product up so quickly and so well.”
He describes the team he assembled for To Kill a Mockingbird as “world class” within community theatre.
The phrase might sound extravagant if he were talking about himself. He rarely does.
Much of Hatzistergos’s education as a director has come through observation and experience rather than formal training.
“You learn different things when you’re acting,” he says. “I’ve just picked up this sort of skill where I watch what people are doing and how they do things.”
“My brain’s like a sponge sometimes.”
He has built his approach gradually, absorbing what works, questioning what does not, and developing his own instincts along the way.
Observation became its own form of training.
“You just sort of pick things up and you just sort of retain it,” he says. “And then you think, okay, that’s what not to do. And maybe this won’t work, or maybe I should try something different.”
He came into theatre through school and HSC drama rather than a conservatory, and has built the rest through performance and experience. Formal training is something he may still pursue. Until now, though, there has been a reluctance to acquire somebody else’s method before he had properly worked out his own.
That concern resembles his resistance to watching earlier versions of To Kill a Mockingbird: the suspicion that influence can become imitation before you notice it.
Now, having directed twice, he thinks training might offer something different. There is already a foundation against which to test it.
What is more surprising is that Hatzistergos once had little interest in directing at all.
“I never wanted to direct,” he says.
Acting had been the attraction. He now describes himself as “retired” from acting, unless something sufficiently interesting comes along.
After Murder on the Nile, even directing appeared unlikely to continue.
“I had no intention actually, before To Kill a Mockingbird, to direct another play,” he says. The first production had been difficult enough for him to wonder whether he wanted to do it again.
His second production changed that.
The experience, he says, made him fall in love with theatre again and want to become more involved.
For all the public arguments that have accumulated around Harper Lee’s novel, what Hatzistergos carried away from months of working on it was much more personal.
Sometimes people judge books by their cover. And beyond face value, there’s actually a lot more to a person than what most people might think.
“I started reflecting on my own life,” he says. “Sometimes people judge books by their cover. And beyond face value, there’s actually a lot more to a person than what most people might think.”
He does not dress the thought up.
“Don’t be too judgemental. Don’t be too harsh on people because you don’t know,” he says. “Although they might be talking to you, you may not know everything that’s going on underneath. And underneath, it might be a completely different person to what you think they are.”
There will be another production.
Hatzistergos is not yet prepared to reveal the title, but he offers a few clues: it began as a book, became an Oscar-winning film starring a well-known actor, and was later adapted for the stage. It is a work he has wanted to direct for years.
He is already thinking about what the audience will experience, however this time he has no intention of bringing the action out to meet them.
“I’m not going to immerse the audience in this one,” he says.
“I’m just going to make them feel trapped.”
Follow Theo Hatzistergos on Instagram at @theo.hatzi and Genesian Theatre at @genesiantheatre.
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