Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner (2003) was an unexpected bestseller. I remember when I interviewed Hosseini, in 2014, he explained how taken aback he had been by its success; he had imagined a novel about Afghanistan would never sell. “I was proud of it, yet it was so dark,” he said. The Kite Runner is the story of a friendship between two boys who grow up together in 1970s Kabul. Amir is the son of a wealthy Pashtun; Hassan, the son of the family’s servant, is a Hazara – from the persecuted ethnic group that makes up 10% of Afghanistan’s population. There was a competent if not memorable film adaptation in 2007, but this American stage version (first performed in Nottingham in 2013) was, as its writer, Matthew Spangler, is at pains to point out, completed before the film’s release and is in no way indebted to it. The novel is about a childhood betrayal, set against an unravelling Afghanistan, and is finely wrought and gripping. You might – unsafely – assume it would be a gift to any playwright.
The show begins with two kites flying aloft like white handkerchiefs aspiring to be seagulls. Tabla player Hanif Khan sits at the front of the stage, his skilful drumming punctuating the narrative and emphasising its tensions. But it is Ben Turner as Amir, now an Afghan refugee living in California, who has to carry the show. He is the string upon which the various scenes, like beads, are threaded. He has presence as an actor, but he supercharges his lines with remorse from the beginning. He needs to risk a more level, varied delivery; if he were less consistently harrowed, we could feel for him more. Andrei Costin plays Hassan, a smaller part, with a stiff gravity that touchingly relaxes into playfulness. But this is not an easy role either, as the character is sketchily drawn. The two adults have to play themselves as children, an undertaking that always tends toward the twee (a difficulty not dodged here). Emilio Doorgasingh, as Amir’s father, has an easier time of it within the confines of adulthood and brings out the complexity of a man who has dangerously high expectations of his son.
Giles Croft’s production tells the story with playful simplicity, a judicious approach. Designer Barney George has ingeniously constructed, from what seems to be no more than a collection of wooden planks, the silhouettes of Kabul and San Francisco, and uses the divided wings of a giant kite as screens upon which to project his images. The staging of Amir’s wedding is particularly vivid. Lisa Zahra’s Soraya looks splendid in her shimmering emerald bridal gown, and the impromptu dance in which male wedding guests in their suits cavort to plaintive Afghan singing has an engaging and authentic feel.
It’s an absorbing show because the story itself is unassailable. The production’s only problem is Spangler’s script. The novel has a dignity that is often missing here – and a restraint. In the novel, when Amir discovers his relationship with Hassan is closer than he had ever realised, he curses but he does not say: “I don’t need this shit.” Spangler disastrously bungles what Amir says about his wife’s infertility (which, in the novel, is beautiful) so that it barely makes sense: “I could feel the emptiness in her womb as if a living breathing thing had come into our marriage.” And Hosseini’s Amir does not say: “I’d go into Starbucks and people would be talking about the cities of my childhood.” In the novel, people talk in a grocery queue. Do we really need Starbucks? The script is like a kite that has got stuck in a tree.
And being stuck in a tree is, curiously enough, the subject of Mathurin Bolze’s Barons perchés. He is back at London’s international mime festival from France – or perhaps one should say he has bounced back, in that he is an extraordinary trampolinist. He delighted audiences in 2005 with his Fenêtres, based on Italo Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees, about an aristocrat who decides to give his heritage the slip and live at the top of the trees on his estate. This is the astonishing sequel, set in what appears to be a threadbare treehouse with swinging lamps, white sheets, a showing of leaves. This time the baron is not alone: he has a friend/shadow/adversary – a possibly imaginary alter ego (Karim Messaoudi). The beauty of the work is in the way that it extends casual routine into dance. This is action as a form of thought. A collage of sound – birdsong, a cello, voices from a clapped-out wireless – accompanies this mesmerising double act. Sometimes the barons seem to be playing a gymnastic version of snakes and ladders. They climb the walls, hurl themselves in the direction of lamps, reach for the light. And after each dramatic, backwards drop on to the trampoline, there is a beauty about the way they recover themselves into stillness.
Star ratings (out of 5)
The Kite Runner ★★★
Barons perchés ★★★★
• The Kite Runner is booking at Wyndham’s, London until 11 March
