Giles Woodforde savours super acting in adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s best-selling novel

Amir and Hassan are boyhood friends, so close that they could easily be affectionate brothers. Growing up in the 1970s, they particularly enjoy seeing films together — John Wayne in Rio Bravo is a favourite. Yet there is a two-acre gulf between them: Amir’s father is a rich businessman living in a grand mansion in Kabul, Afghanistan. Hassan is the son of a family servant living in a tin shack at the bottom of the mansion’s vast garden.

“I became what I am today in 1975,” Amir explains. In that year, in a Kabul that was still relatively peaceful, he ignores Hassan’s cries for help when he is violently attacked by a gang of bullies.

“He’s not my friend, he’s my servant,” Amir cries as the bullies next advance on him.

Another religion and another time, but the parallel with Judas Iscariot is inescapable. On that very same day, Amir wins the macho-testing annual kite flying competition — even his father is proud of him, having previously regarded his son as a bookish wimp. The friendship is shattered, and Amir sets out on a long quest to make amends for his act of cowardice.

The story is told in Khaled Hosseini’s best-selling, and partly autobiographical novel The Kite Runner.

Filmed in 2007, the book has been adapted for the stage by Matthew Spangler, with Hosseini’s active collaboration. Now the stage version is receiving its European premiere, in a joint production by the Nottingham and Liverpool Playhouses.

As the programme puts it: “The wheel of violence, that started to overwhelm Afghans’ lives as The Kite Runner’s story begins, is turning still.”

When the Russians invaded in 1979, Amir’s family abandoned home and fortune, ending up penniless in San Francisco.

This means that the play must span two continents, and three decades — a tall order in a low-budget production, not least for Ben Turner, playing Amir. Although he’s dressed in American-style white shirt and grey chinos throughout, he nevertheless succeeds in convincing you that he is first a seven-year-old boy, then a rich adult reduced to poverty. He also leaves you in no doubt of the terrible guilt that gnaws away inside Amir.

There’s excellent work, too, from Andrei Costin as Hassan: he says little, but conveys much through his body language.

Directed by Giles Croft, this is a strong, clear piece of storytelling, simply and effectively staged with beautiful, mimed, kite flying sequen-ces, and projected back-drops (designer Barney George).

The Kite Runner
Oxford Playhouse
Until Saturday
Box office: Call 01865 305305 or visit www.oxfordplayhouse.com