‘The Kite Runner’ is a Nottingham Playhouse and Liverpool Everyman & Playhouse co-production with UK Productions and Flying Entertainment. It’s an adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s novel which the trailer, programme and posters urgently remind us is an ‘international best-selling novel’ which went on to spawn ‘a major feature film’. All of this is meant to sound impressive, which makes the play all the more disappointing: it’s a cheap capitalisation on a cultural phenomenon which, whatever its merits as a novel, should never have been made into a play.
The pacing throughout is appalling thanks to an impossible script which relies on endless tonally-unvarying narration for a crutch to what amounts to a recounting and not an adaptation. “Show, don’t tell” is an elementary commandment, but this is precisely where ‘The Kite Runner’ falls down. One gets a sense of the powerful poetry of Hosseini’s original work, but it jars with Raj Ghatak’s insincere, static delivery which must make up at least a third of the entire runtime, and it overrules the brief snatches of actual dramatic representation the audience is allowed.
The verbose retrospective of the narration created an ironic distance between past and present, particularly in the first half of the play when Ghatak would flit incessantly between the older-narrating and childhood-acting version of Amir, which made it impossible to fully empathise with our protagonist. The overuse of telling also created instances which clearly robbed director and actors of choice and sometimes forced actors into carrying out described actions which did not feel believable, particularly in almost every instance in which a character was said to have cried and the actor was then expected to do so on the spot.
One thing the production got mostly right were the scenic and design elements. Having Hanif Khan front of stage for the entire play producing accompanying middle-eastern soundscapes on traditional instruments did help to create the sense of place for the production and hinted at the roles of culture and tradition once the plot moved Amir away from Afghanistan. It was also somewhat innovative to have locations evoked by projections on a giant kite which sometimes descended from the flyspace. However, in terms of adaptation these design elements aren’t actually utilised. The mise en scène managed to be pretty and clever without being interesting or usefully informing the action, pretty externality clashing awkwardly with the introversion of the storytelling perspective. There were also very strange things going on with the height of the stage, which was raised by about a foot above the Playhouse’s actual stage, meaning that for the stalls characters were mostly invisible when they sat down.
Another good point about the production, perhaps necessarily for its subject matter, was the BAME representation of the cast – it is refreshing to see a show with a cast almost entirely British-Asian or middle eastern given the pervasive whiteness of the majority of British theatre. It is therefore a shame for such an oft-underrepresented cast to be wasted on this production. Acting and directing was limited in creativity and believability throughout, perhaps due to the limits of the adaptation’s script, and there’s a sense throughout of complete lack of stakes from moment to moment, particularly in Philip D’Orléans lacklustre fight choreography. One couldn’t honestly believe that, for example the taxi driver in Act 2 was actually going to throttle the orphanage manager if Amir hadn’t stopped him, nor could one believe that Assef was actually going to assault Hassan if the kite hadn’t obstructed our view at the last moment. Thank goodness, then, that the narrator was there to tell us these things happened.
Of the actors, Raj Ghatak deserves some credit for his stamina in spending almost the entire 160-minute runtime onstage as the narrator-cum-actor Amir, though his delivery of the narration left much to be desired as its incessantly declamatory style didn’t fit with the kind of introverted confessional the plot is built around. Jo Ben Ayed’s Hassan was certainly sympathetic though overdid it with the feebleness, especially when he played the same character again as Sohrab. Finally, Gary Pillai deserves credit for his believable turn as the stern but loveable Baba.
2/5
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