THE crucial difference between the 2006 production of To Kill A Mockingbird at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, and the new show at York Theatre Royal is in the choice of narrator.

“We’re using a different version,” says artistic director Damian Cruden. “This version has an older version of Scout, the daughter of lawyer Atticus Finch, telling the story, so it’s a memory play, which Harper Lee’s book is.

“It’s reflective of life, which is important, because if you remove that, you remove the contemporary resonance of the play and the book.”

The story of the rape trial of black labourer Tom Robinson may be set in the 1930s, but it reflects the 1950s, when it was written, suggests Damian.

“It was right in the heart of the civil rights movement, so you have the peace marches, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, and as a result it addresses some really serious issues about how the white community used black people,” says Damian.

“It also reflects how, when Harper Lee wrote it, the attitudes had not changed much from the 1930s, and it still reflects that now. Why have things not changed, even today?”

Right at the heart of the play, says Damian, is how the white community of Maycomb, Alabama, sees the black community in their American Deep South town.

“They don’t see black people as being human; they see them as being other, and that’s why we’ve got to keep reminding people that this is a ridiculous attitude,” he says.

“As soon as one group of people uses certain things to define other people as not human, then you have a problem.”

• To Kill A Mockingbird runs at York Theatre Royal until February 26, then on tour. Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk