|
|
|
|
|
Wise adaptation flying high
Ben Turner as the boy Amir and Farshid Rokey as his ill-fated friend Hassan. Pictures: Robert Day The Kite Runner Nottingham Playhouse ***** The splendid
Giles Croft is into his 15th year at the helm of the modernist-designed
Nottingham Playhouse, and his copious talent doesn't look like failing
him. Croft has a gift for
spotting and ferreting out scripts – polished during his time as
Literary Manager at the National under Richard Eyre. Before that, in a
five year stint, he anticipated Stephen Daldry in perking up West
London's Gate Theatre; then staged Anna
Karenina at Giles Croft's own productions, 50 years from its
opening, have kept the Modern movement Playhouse complex, John Neville's
flagship Midland company and Nottingham's international reputation, just
where they need to be: out in front. Chicken Soup with Barley, The Burial at And now comes The Kite Runner. Give the
tear-jerking material of Kabul-born Khaled Hosseini's book, unafraid to
edge into touchy areas, the whole narrative a coming-of-age story laced
with pain, one might feel almost a compunction, a politically correct
duty, to applaud this staging.
Ben Turner (right) as the grown-up Amir with Farshid Rokey, doubling as his friend's son Sohrab But there is no such need. Modest,
unostentatious, sensitive, finger on the pulse, breathtakingly
restrained and imaginative, this is a major dramatic achievement, one
that deserves to rank high among 2013's plays of the year.
Much hinges on Matthew Spangler's authorised
adaptation, closely discussed with the author, a loyal and skilled
compaction that preserves so much of the humility, spirit and up-tight
intensity of the original. There is beauty in the script, the cast –
beautifully honest and thoughtful performances by any standards – and in
the relationship between the boys established here by Farshid Roki (the
doomed Hassan) and Ben Turner (the chastened survivor, Amir). I will give the game away. It is inevitable that
Rokey, an actor of quite astonishing understatement and gestural
subtlety, will resurrect (his original character having been mercilessly
excised by the ghastly Taliban) as his own son, Sohrab. Rokey, like the
others, appears in a couple of company roles (some rather good bus
queues and immigration sequences stand out, for instance); but is
removed from sight just long enough to surprise us with his
(scintillatingly monochromed) appearance as the lost boy named after the
11th century Persian classic, Sohrab and Rustum.
His very name ensures we are plugged into an epic
past, of generations yielding one to another, of flowers that flourish
even after their parents are scythed down. A generation that may, who
knows, give new life after the failure of monarchy, the ineptness of
Communism and the brutalist smugness of the worst manifestations of
Islam, the religion this play determinedly hymns.
Splendid though Ben Turner's aspiring novelist
Amir was, he always primarily triumphed when playing the boy,
aeroplaning around like Christian Bale's Jim Graham in Empire of the
Sun, flattened by the puzzles of well-heeled paternal reprimands (as
Baba, the utterly excellent, fine-honed, money-made aristocratic Emilio
Doorgasingh: excellent even when luck swings against him); never quite
as convincing when self-asserting (against Antony Bunsee's equally
splendid, Djinnah-like, proud father-in-law General Taheri); curiously
though presumably deliberately unaging; and with an iffily practised
American accent which is only, after many emotional jarrings, explained
later.
You'd have thought - even if only spurred by at
the jibe ‘faggot' – he'd have a go at his tormentors, for Amir never
seems pacifistic like Rokey's Hassan. Which only reminds us how very
young these boys must have been.
Yet when the eyes open in unabashed optimism, and
the voice matches, this British Iranian actor, just 33, can be quite
magical, and a compelling honesty shines through. ‘We were kids who's
learned to crawl together.' Exactly.
These two elders, to whom add the dignified,
pleasingly versatile Nicholas Khan (as Rahim Khan), a kind of Great War
leftover who excels as the crucial family friend (who befriends the boy
and will mastermind the book's ultimate - fraternal - reconciliation),
as the ex-Third Reich doctor and sundry other nicely nursed medium
roles, contribute a vast amount to Croft's team, in a staging that is
riddled with fine detail, some of it so subtle you almost don't see it. But the younger lot, including the mid- to
late-teenage bullies, emerge well too. Nicholas Karimi has the plums,
and never wastes them; as excellent as a praying wedding attendant as
abysmally plotting the cowardly rape he inflicts on Hassan (only just
offstage) which destroys the two younger boys' relationship.
Is it the event which wrecks it, or the guilt
that follows; or – not to exonerate the bullies, whose entire manner
anticipates the Taliban - is it possibly coming anyway: is it called
adolescence? Is the hero's flight, in this ideal world so brilliantly
captured in earlier scenes, not just from sexual abuse, and the
knowledge of it, but from the whispers of sexuality itself? Childhood rites of passage tormentor and adult
villain are in fact the same person; the loathsome Assef. Karimi
resurfaces as the Taliban warlord who fancies himself as John Lennon but
is (still) a ritual psychopath, who plays with terror as if boys were
his Barbie dolls.
But the stroke of special genius from these
mid-age extras (though no one in this tight-pulling team could really be
dubbed an extra) comes from David Ahmad, in an astounding late vignette
(freed from his young thug role) depicting the director of a
time-marooned children's home. Hosseini could almost write another book
about him. Ahmad has almost as many facial permutations, all movingly
apt, as Rokey; as the orphanage head, Zaman, he established himself in
two minutes flat as an actor of poignancy, of real moment.
That a set with only two main ideas – plus some
nicely planned ramps which give interesting angles and levels to the
cast's entries – could be so arresting is pretty astounding. Barney
George's design, coupled integrally with William Simpson's special and
unique projections, wrought wonders. I never quite fathomed how a simple Pashtun
palisade converts to a Los Angeles skyline, then to the most
spectacularly beautiful purpled wedding backdrop (when Amir marries the
general's daughter, Lisa Zahra's stocky, worldly-wise Soraya).
Simpson, with Charles Balfour on lights, seemed
able to fit any projection to not just a row of sticks, but to the
evening's most brilliant conceit – glorious, because it so economically
evokes and cherishes the central Asian atmosphere - of a pair of curtain
that descend like butterfly's wings: more importantly, like a kite. Even
the kitelets on the blue cyclorama during the curtain calls, like
whispered echoes, are cleverly evocative; a lost era summed up.
But The Kite Runner is a nasty play in
many ways, as racist as a play can get: majority Farsi-speaking Pashtun
against lower-class Hazara, Sunni confronting Shia: a socio-religious
set-up with an extremely nasty smell that make Romeo and Juliet
seem pure child's play. ‘Someone has to take the garbage out.' This is
what Hosseini is pleading against; and this is what Farshid Rokey's
Hassan, the flat-nosed Hazara, the garbage if you like, becomes the
symbol for.
I lost count of the characteristics and
half-gestures that gave Rokey's acting such weight, drawing you in,
winning your sympathy, exploring the child in childhood: a sideway
flick, lowered face, raised eyebrows, a blink, furrowed concentration,
slouched shoulders, desperate glances, wan expectation, hint of
understanding; self-inflicted silences, taking no notice, absorption,
deference; a deep, deep innocence being slowly carved into and then
crushed and gushing away. How many other roles could Rokey play, I
thought? Wrong. He can do many, and Giles Croft will have a good idea
which, and how to bring them out.
The characters in this play ought to develop, and
change, by the time the play reaches Civilisations evolve, humans usually don't.
Except in the process of coming of age, which this production explores
so intelligently. ‘Children aren't like colouring books: you don't get
to colour them in with all your favourite colours.' When Amir accuses Hassan of the same cowardice
his father has just cursed him for, the truth to life, our almost
universal hypocrisy, rings through. Irony writ large. ‘There is a way to be good again,' urges the wise, instinctive Rahim Khan. Arthur Miller-like by the end, this is a wise book, in a wise adaptation, in a wise, and wisely paced, production. To 18-05-13 Roderic Dunnett :Nottingham Playhouse 0115 941 9419
www.nottinghamplayhouse.co.uk Then Liverpool Playhouse Thu 13 Jun to Sat 6 July
www.everymanplayhouse.com Brighton Festival (Theatre Royal) Tues 21-Fri 25 May 01273 709709 www.brightonfestival.
|
|
|
Home Nottingham Playhouse Reviews A-Z Reviews by Theatre Tweet |
|
|
|
