Despite being stuck in the thick of third-year deadline season, I couldn’t turn down the chance to go and see the acclaimed play adaptation of Khalid Hosseini’s novel, The Kite Runner The book was highly regarded when it was published in 2003 and was even thought consequential enough to be added to the A-Level English Literature syllabus. Now, this is where all my knowledge of the book-turned-play came from: the many hours and many pastel-coloured highlighters poured over its pages in the pressure cooker of my Sixth Form English class. Safe to say, I was looking forward to seeing the novel in a whole new light, and I was not disappointed.
TW: Sexual assault, violence
The play spans the decades of 1970 to the early 2000s and has a double arc following Amir’s (Stuart Vincent) journey to confront his past, the betrayal of his best friend and his subsequent attempt at gaining redemption. All this while also tracking the tumultuous history of Afghanistan as it portrays the country before the war, on the verge of war, the Soviet invasion, and subsequently in the later rise of the Taliban regime.
It was a warm day when my dad and I made our way to The Lowry Theatre. I had lent my dad my copy of The Kite Runner about a year ago, so when I told him that I had two press tickets to the show he assured me I just had to take him. We were running slightly late by the time we had made it through the traffic backed up along the Mancunian Way, but I was warm, flustered, and knew I would need a Pepsi Max at some point through the 2-hour 30-minute duration of the show. Despite my dad insisting that I didn’t have time, I grabbed a can from the refreshment bar and ran into the theatre, meeting my dad there who had gone ahead to “secure the seats.”
As I stepped into the theatre, I was completely transported and immersed into a world that couldn’t have been more different from the one I’d just come from. The lights were low and warm-toned, making it feel as though the sun was setting on one of those long days of playing as a child where everything is a haze of happiness. There seemed to be a sort of scent being circulated in the theatre somehow, it smelt like eucalyptus with a hint of fuchsia.
Most powerfully of all however was the sound reverberating through the room; downstage sat a man on a rug surrounded by percussion instruments that he elegantly played while people filtered into their seats. I learnt from the programme that the drum that musician Hanif Khan was playing was called a tabla. It was breathtaking. For me, the music is one of the things that makes this show unlike anything else I have seen in live theatre. The programme explains that the director Giles Croft ‘wanted to find a way of bringing the world of Afghanistan to his audience by inviting them into the story with us’ and this is certainly what the instrumentality does. From the Schwirrbogen, or ‘large, over-grown, wooden football-rattles’ that imitate the whipping winds of Afghanistan and enrich scenes such as the central kite fighting tournament in the first half, to the Singing Bowls that are used in scenes of extreme tension to create a drumming heartbeat in your ears as if you too are immersed in the heart-wrenching and high-stakes scenes.
This instrumentality really bolstered what to me was a thoroughly impressive cast of actors. I want to especially highlight Dean Rehman who plays Baba, the father of protagonist Amir for his command of the stage throughout the play is oftentimes breathtaking. He authentically ages forty years throughout his time on the stage. He is a proud single father and a successful, attention-grabbing young Afghan man when he is in Kabul and slowly deteriorates into a fragile, ill-stricken and displaced elderly man with cancer living in San Francisco. Rehman is somehow able to embody both sides of Baba perfectly, powerfully setting the moral bar for all the other characters throughout.
Other cast members were equally as great however, it must be stated that at times the portrayal of Amir was at times conflicting as his scenes as a child felt overly condescended and childish, moreover, I found it difficult at times to believe the American accent used to distinguish between adult and child Amir, as I overheard another audience member next to me also attest to: “it’s moving but it’s just his accent I can’t get behind it, it like an American twang but it just doesn’t work for me.” This is not to say that it took away from the overall great performance but just that at times it took you out of the world that the production had otherwise completely immersed the audience within.
The set design was simplistic but effective, with two large and well-crafted kite-shaped pieces of fabric being suspended from the ceiling, drifting together or apart depending on the action of the scene. These large kites play a very specific role in the narrative as, if you are familiar with the story, the sexual assault of Hassan that takes place in the first half of the play is concealed by these pieces of set. The set designer Barney George uses them in a very inventive way as when the action of the scene is taken behind these two large kites, they represent the boundary between Hassan’s childhood and innocence and his trauma. This scene is dealt with with immense sensitivity on the stage.
Overall, I must say that this was certainly the best page-to-stage adaptation I have seen. Both director and cast do the already existing strong plotline justice and in ways that the book and the film cannot, force you to really sit in the trauma of the events of the story. You are unable to skim over lines or flick through pages as you may with a book and are unable to tune out or escape with a scroll on your phone in moments that are not easily digestible and so for me the story is even more impactful in this medium.
The strengths of the play certainly lie with the music and the acting while at times it was difficult to follow with the at times jarring flitting between post-9/11 San Francisco and 1970s Afghanistan with the same actors playing the characters as children, I concluded that this was down to the time constraints of fitting such a timespan into just over two hours. I left the theatre feeling simultaneously hopeful and despairing at the inhumanity of humanity, both on a large scale, such as with the larger political issues of Afghan history but also towards mankind within our most intimate, interpersonal relationships. It was without being cliché a real eye-opener and a truly educational visit to the theatre that is especially poignant in the current political climate.
The Kite Runner is performing at the Lowry until Saturday, May 11. It will then tour throughout the UK in May, June and July. Book tickets here and read more about the show here.
