Ben Turner as Amir and Andrei Costin as Hassan in The Kite Runner (Photo by Robert Day)
Khaled Hosseini’s debut novel has been possibly the literary phenomenon of the past decade. Written in the years leading up to the fall of the Twin Towers, when many Westerners would have been hard-pressed to locate Afghanistan on a map, it became something of a zeitgeist after its publication in 2003, providing a very human flipside to the brutal depictions of the country by then plastered across every news outlet.
It first spawned a successful film, but as the man tasked with adapting it for the stage, Matthew Spangler, explains in the intimate Q&A session before the play’s first night in Birmingham, The Kite Runner has been scaled back for its theatre incarnation.
“With the film, I felt it was harder to access the characters’ thoughts and feelings”, he explains, “so [with the play] we walk a bit of a tightrope – there’s narration…[but] we didn’t want there to be too much or too little”.
The book’s author was apparently very keen to have input too, tweaking details which with hindsight he would have changed before publication. The result is a punchier take on the story, with lead character Amir (played as both boy and man by the same actor, for the first time in the play’s nine productions) delivering numerous soliloquies taken largely verbatim from the text of the book.
What emerges is a deceptively sparse-looking theatrical offering, with ingeniously simple flourishes in the lighting of backdrop and floor providing visual cues to mood and location. The almost-permanent stage-front musician (Hanif Khan) is also something of a masterstroke, almost as effective through his silence as when he’s providing tabla and singing-bowl accompaniment to weddings, fights or dialogue.
The play begins slightly worryingly for this non-Farsi-speaker, with frantic bursts of the language punctuated only briefly by Ben Turner’s narration; thankfully translation isn’t necessary as once the other cast members begin to join him and Andrei Costin (Hassan) onstage the dialogue switches almost entirely to English. The book’s comic asides are expounded on beautifully, but as the lighting grows more stark in the buildup to the plot’s pivot point the atmosphere becomes palpably darker.
Andrei Costin as Hassan and Ben Turner as Amir in The Kite Runner (Photo by Robert Day)
It can have been no mean feat to cram all of the strands of this story – betrayal and forgiveness; love and loss; immigration and alienation; damnation and forgiveness – into a little more than two hours, but it has been masterfully done. Without leaving out any major story arc and with perfect casting, this adaption fleshes out almost every character as needed (although Nicholas Khan’s Rahim Khan is sadly under-used, and Anthony Bunsee’s General Taheri veers towards ‘Christopher Lee does pantomime villain’ at times) and divides the tale neatly in two with its interval.
There are eggshells to be walked on in describing the second half to avoid spoilers for anyone new to The Kite Runner, but it’ll ruin no-one’s enjoyment to comment on a hilariously camp ‘coming to America’ scene and how dangerously close the compacted version leans towards a ‘young man on a quest’ cliché. It’s largely avoided, though, and whilst the book’s more brutal depictions of Taliban-ruled Kabul are merely hinted at (and what could have easily been comical fake-beard-wearing is thankfully left out entirely) by the closing scene there will be few left emotionally untouched by the evening.
With such powerful and widely-loved source material the biggest compliment that can be paid to a stage adaptation is that it emphatically doesn’t disappoint, the standing ovation for this Birmingham debut thoroughly deserved. You have until October 4th to catch The Kite Runner at the Rep; I recommend putting it high on your list of priorities.
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Ian Savage
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The Kite Runner runs from Monday 22 September, until Saturday 4 October at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre.
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