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A flight from the past The Kite Runner
Malvern Theatres
***** FROM the fall
of the monarchy in Afghanistan to the destruction of the Twin Towers,
the novel and stage adaptation of ‘The Kite Runner’ spans a very
traumatic time in the life of the nation of Afghanistan, including a
communist revolution, a Soviet invasion and the takeover by the Taliban. In reflecting those traumas in the story of Amir
and Hassan and their families, the writer has attempted something epic
and powerfully human. The play starts in the middle of Amir’s story
with the invitation to return from San Francisco to the country of his
birth, to redeem the devastating failure of his childhood in abandoning
his close friend Hassan to the violence of a local gang. Consequently
the first Act is a flashback to those early experiences: the second Act
explores his return to intervene in the life of Sohrab, Hassan’s son,
and atone for his earlier cowardice and guilt. This is a very dramatic and moving story about
guilt, forgiveness and compensation; it is also a powerful exploration
of father-child relationships: for Amir much of his life is an attempt
to win his father Baba’s approval; for Baba, life is an attempt to be
secretly the father to Hassan that he cannot be openly and publicly; for
Soraya, Amir’s wife, too, the relationship with her father adds another
dimension to the theme. There is so much ‘story’ in this novel that the
first act contains quite a lot of narrative, delivered by Amir as a
narrator to the audience. This takes some time to unfold and can lack
some dramatic impact, but it lays the foundation for all the emotional
drama that follows. The result is an extreme roller-coaster of emotional
and dramatic tension that ended with half the audience rising to its
feet at the end of the performance. The design and staging was simple, striking and
effective: the backdrop of a somewhat abstract image of the San
Francisco skyline was overlaid by curtains and drapes th
The cast was excellent, even if the accents
wobbled a little at times: Ben Turner as Amir was central and powerful.
As a child in the early scenes, as a young adult in the second half, he
maintained a moving performance with hardly any breathing time off the
stage! He communicated the inner turmoil, guilt and anguish of Amir
powerfully. Andrei Costin’s Hassan (and Sohrab) was
excellent, the villain Assef played by Nicholas Karimi was deeply
sinister, and the fathers played by Emilio Doorgasingh, Antony Bunsee
and Ezra Khan were strong, Lisa Zahra as Soraya had a touching stillness
to her performance. This was dramatically a powerful and
gut-wrenching evening; there were moments of very wry and ironic humour,
but after the slightly slow narrative preparation, we were on a moving
journey that stirred the heart strings: the characters this English
audience was watching were deeply moved by the humanness of Amir’s
suffering, by the unquestioning loyalty and service of Hassan and his
father, and ultimately by the sense that there was at the end of a long
and painful journey a hope of redemption, forgiveness and a new and more
hopeful future. This is an intense dramatic experience that lacks
the popularity of the musical and the comedy, but it is, for the most
part, theatre at its very best! To 11-10-14 Timothy Crow
06-10-14 The Kite Runner's tour brings it back to the Midlands from 20 - 25 October2014 at the
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provided alternative settings from time to time; the portrayal of the
flying of the kites was mimed brilliantly, the use of choreography,
oriental music and choral effects complemented the ensemble performance
by the cast and created a stirring atmosphere and context for the
narrative.