Evening Standard Comment: To Kill a Mockingbird on the West End as timely as ever

It’s five stars and a standing ovation for writer Aaron Sorkin and director Bartlett Sher’s adaptation of Harper Lee’s classic, To Kill a Mockingbird, which opened last night in the West End after transferring from Broadway.

The play about race, community and family was, as our chief theatre critic says in his review, “both unbearably moving and surprisingly funny”.

Inspired by Donald Trump’s “very fine people” comment about marchers at Charlottesville, Virginia, a white supremacist rally that included a terrorist attack, this adaptation has rarely seemed so timely. Grab your tickets while you can.

Thanks to the success of the vaccine rollout, Britain is in a place whereby it can start to treat Covid-19 in the way we do other respiratory infections.

There are still things we can all do to limit the spread of infection. People with symptoms should stay at home and isolate from others. Commuters should wear masks on the Tube, employers should consider providing free lateral flow tests to employees.

We must also invest in ventilation and roll out clean air units in schools and offices. Yet as we report today, just 141 schools in London have been given free air-cleaning units to help protect children and staff against infection.

Learning to live with Covid will be a bumpy ride. The virus has proven time and again its ability to adapt and thrive. But the prize — a return to something close to life as normal — is well worth it.