The Kite Runner
The Kite Runner
King's Theatre, Edinburgh
Neil Cooper
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A lone tabla player ushers in Giles Croft's formidable production of Matthew Spangler's adaptation of Khaled Hosseini's best-selling novel with a frantic overture that points up the turmoil of the story's Afghan origins. If the images of big city skyscrapers that loom behind offer up some kind of salvation, the opening speech by the play's narrator Amir is poetic enough to resemble a Tennessee Williams monologue.
Worlds collide and cultures clash in far crueller ways over the next two and a half hours, from the moment Amir plays cowboys with his best friend and father's servant's son, Hassan, after watching John Wayne films in the Iranian cinema in mid-1970s Kabul. Separated by class and ethnicity, Amir and Hassan's fates are marked by a shocking childhood event that sees Hassan brutalised, while Amir's shameful acquiescence leaves him hard to sympathise with, let alone like.
What follows, as the Russian invasion of Afghanistan sees Amir and his father flee to 1980s San Francisco, is a story of betrayal, identity, heritage and redemption. Amir seeks only to prove himself worthy to his father, a metaphor for a greater patriarchy powerfully and evocatively delivered by Ben Turner as Amir.
Turner is onstage throughout this touring version of a production originally presented by Nottingham and Liverpool Playhouses, and makes for a charismatic presence as he leads a cast of 10 through a theatrical assault course of love and war.
On a stage awash with images of east and west, by the end things appear akin to a Blood Brothers for the post-9/11 world in a poignant study of emotional and political exile.
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