Review: The Kite Runner, the Lyceum, Sheffield
The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini’s heart-wrenching, haunting story of guilt and atonement – paints pictures with its words.
The tranquil gardens of affluent Afghanistan before the mujahidin took hold… soaring kites flashing against a shimmering sky… dark spots of blood dripping silently onto snowy ground in the first of the book’s several harrowing scenes.
And, like the story, the stage version – at the Lyceum in Sheffield until Saturday, June 8 – is also at its best when the tale is told through the imagery, the sensory, over and above the dialogue.
Through the rhythmic beating of the dohol drums as the audience take their seats, we are transported to the Kabul of 1973, where our protagonist and narrator, Amir, grew up alongside his best friend and servant, Hassan.
The two lead actors, Stuart Vincent as Amir and Yazdan Qafoiri as Hassan, chatter and laugh as children in their Persian mother tongue of Farsi; run and tumble across the curved stage floor like a giant game of parkour.
Rattles are swung as handheld windmakers, the eerie pitch of singing bowls stirs a sense of tense unease, and on the huge canvas kites used for movie-like scenery projections, the boys huddle in the safety of their pomegranate tree – before everything in their lives goes hideously wrong.
The stage adaptation’s demanding script – such a lot of storytelling, and intergenerational explanation, against the bloody events of a quarter century of violent history – means Vincent must cut in and out of acting and narrating, from one timeframe to another, whilst barely snatching a breath.
He does a good job, in an almost convincing American accent. But the constraints of the two-hour stage show mean he speaks quickly, in a sometimes oddly cheerful tone, and some of the story’s emotion is lost.
When he denies Hassan to the psycopath Assef in one awful, devastating line – “he’s not my friend, he’s my servant” – the sentence needs space around it to breathe, for our shocked inhalation to convey its wounding betrayal.
Instead the dialogue rattles on, and the script skims through scenes which in the book depict so much, but which in the play are reduced to brief chronological vignettes.
Bhavin Bhatt is truly sinister as the unhinged Assef, shooting at the boys with a deranged ‘bang, bang, bang’. Dean Rehman is assured as Amir’s Baba, strong and confident as a wealthy businessman in Kabul, reduced to just his dignified pride as a gas station attendant in San Francisco.
But the star of the show is the story as Hosseini wrote it, a circular tale not just of redemption but of immigration, indignity, identity, love.
And that cannot be bettered by a stage show than the way it is told already in the beautiful, unforgettable book.
