THE KITE RUNNER AT THE ARTS THEATRE
The_Kite_Runner
“Hovering and swooping, a bevy of kites can nearly always be seen in the sky above Kabul. Some are tugged and turned by kids on the flat roofs of the city’s mud-brick houses” Jonathan Steele 2005
The three thousand year old sport of kite flying is brilliantly captured onstage - a deceptively difficult art to master . In fact the heavy atmosphere of Kabul swirls around the auditorium long before the action begins. The search for an expert professional Tabla player by Musical Director Jonathan Girling, threw up a superb performer - on stage as the audience take their seats. . We are soon in the centre of a well-off , but sparse Kabul family: Amir the entitled young heir and servant Hassan and their fathers.
Amir and his father ‘Baba’
Amir is lonely insecure and the spoilt son of a wealthy family. His story is hardly original. He could be a whole raft of brooding, self- loathing youths with thwarted writerly ambition and unresolved Oedipal hang- ups , from Hamlet to Jimmy Porter. A remarkably intense Stuart Vincent gives his angst and anxiety a sharp focus. Amir ‘s personal servant Hassan is a greater soul, selfless, subservient but strong he is nevertheless perceived as an inferior “We could never be friends” Amir announces with tragic lack of insight, ‘Because he is a different caste’. But all is not what it seems in the grand mansion of elegantly suited Baba, magnificently rendered by Dean Rehman as the stubborn elitist dad with a barrel of secrets behind his erratic personality. The action is theatre gold.; it could be anywhere from Eugene O’Neil’s “A Long Day’s. Journey into Night’ to any play by Chekhov or Strindberg.
The colour and costume, the song and tradition elevate this tortured tragedy into a watchable drama. But sometimes not. The playwright Matthew Spangler manages the material with skill but admits, “There is just so much in it”. Which for an epic novel is a huge asset, and accounts for the world -wide success of the original Khaled Housseini book.. But reduced to a two-hour drama, the events so often horrifying, pile one on another. This is the story of a family, a tribe , a civilisation often in flight from cruelty on a large scale -at other times, they are themselves the perpetrators, Amir is deluded, guilty, racked with regret. Some of the scenes are too explicit –Christopher Glover’s Assaf acting out a rape - even briefly - was too strong for me. Yes, Assay is a brutal character - in his three roles, each worse than the next, that of the murderous Taliban child kidnapper being the most depraved., But these later scenes were subtly sinisterly implied. Glover is an amazing actor on top of his form. Evil surely need not be graphic, we get it.
The packed audience gave the play a rapturous appreciation, they cheered the talented company to the rafters. The joy of Afghanistan culture, music, attitude and resilience won - in the teeth of so much threat and terror. Quite a feat for one ensemble of actors and a testimony to each and every performer.
