European premiere of Hosseini bestseller in Nottingham

Published: 24 November 2012
Reporter: Steve Orme

The Kite Runner

Nottingham Playhouse and Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse have secured the rights to stage the European premiere of Matthew Spangler’s stage adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s international bestseller, The Kite Runner.

The venues describe it as “an extraordinary theatrical coup” which will take to the stage next spring.

The play was first produced by the San Jose Repertory in 2009 and won five San Francisco Bay Area theatre critics’ circle awards.

The Kite Runner, which was published in 2003, was Khaled Hosseini’s first novel. It became a bestseller across the globe and has since been published in 70 countries.

The book tells the story of Amir, a young boy from the Wazir Akbar Khan district of Kabul, whose closest friend is Hassan, his father's young Hazara servant.

The tale is set against a backdrop of tumultuous events, from the fall of Afghanistan's monarchy through the Soviet invasion, the exodus of refugees to Pakistan and the United States, and the rise of the Taliban regime.

It charts a friendship that spans cultures and continents, and follows one man’s journey to confront his past and find redemption.

Nottingham Playhouse artistic director Giles Croft said, “I found reading The Kite Runner an immensely powerful experience, and so I was delighted to discover Matthew Spangler’s honest, imaginative and theatrical adaptation of such a timeless story of hope and redemption.

“Among its many striking resonances, The Kite Runner tells of the immigrant experience, something that is central to the development of our own culture and is lived by many day to day in British cities like Nottingham and Liverpool.

“I was immediately excited by the thought of bringing the play to Europe for the first time.

“But it seems to me that it has another profound connection to Britain: as we move towards a complete troop withdrawal from Afghanistan it is good and important to be reminded of the Afghans’ own stories and histories.

“We have inevitably become bound up in the tragedies and politics of this most recent Afghan war and the experiences of western troops.

“It is easy to forget that the Afghans are a people with a complex and rich culture, with their own story to tell, and that story won't stop or cease to be relevant when our troops come home.

The Kite Runner is truly a story of our time, and bringing its vivid and haunting mix of betrayal and personal salvation to the British stage for the first time is a thrilling prospect.”

The Kite Runner is part of the spring season at Nottingham Playhouse which will be marking 50 years since the theatre opened to the public.

There will be a number of special events throughout 2013 culminating in a gala performance in December—50 years to the day that the company presented extracts from Shakespeare’s Coriolanus on the new stage.

Highlights of the spring season include Joking Apart, one of Alan Ayckbourn’s lesser-known plays, from 26 January until 16 February; Philip Pullman’s I Was A Rat! from 26 March until 13 April; and the return of The Ashes, Nottingham writer Michael Pinchbeck’s story of Nottinghamshire cricketing hero Harold Larwood, which will run from 27 June until 6 July to coincide with the Ashes Test series against Australia which opens at Trent Bridge in Nottingham.

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