Roxana Silbert first directed Ursula Rani Sarma’s stage adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s 2007 novel in 2019 when she was Artistic Director at The Birmingham Rep. She returns to The Rep for this new production of the same play, which then heads out on a short tour.
A Thousand Splendid Suns was Hosseini’s follow up to his bestseller The Kite Runner. The title is a quotation from the poem, Kabul, by the 17th century Persian lyric poet, Saib Tabrizi. In it, Tabrizi describes the beauty of Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, where Khaled Hosseini was born. Hosseini has lived most of his life in California, and the poem captures something of the nostalgia and romance with which an expat views their home. Ursula Rani Sarma is an Irish writer of Indian heritage, so as someone who is also, in part, defined by a cultural heritage she lives at a distance from, she is a good fit for the stage adaptation.
The play tells the story of the last fifty years of Afghanistan through one family: Rasheed (Jonas Khan), his two wives Mariam (Rina Fatania) and Laila (Kerena Jagpal) and Laila’s children, Aziza (Humera Syed) and Zalmai (Noah Manzoor).
The play opens in Kabul in an unspecified year during an undefined conflict. The young Laila’s family is packing up to seek refuge from a repressive political regime; a bomb drops on their house killing her parents and leaving Laila an orphan. Their neighbour, Mariam, takes Laila in, and the story develops from there. Over the next two hours, we flash back to Mariam’s childhood and jump forward to Aziza and Zalmai grown up, so this play covers a lot of ground and a lot of Afghan history: the Soviet occupation and withdrawal, the Civil Wars, the rise of the Taliban and the US invasion.
Various news events punctuate the action to give us something to relate the personal stories to, but they are only referred to in passing. The Mujahideen destroy Rasheed’s business, so that is presumably in 1992, but the words ‘Soviet’ and ‘Mujahideen’ are barely used, so if you miss them, I’m not sure how you would place it.
In one scene, the Taliban drops fliers announcing the imposition of strict sharia law, which Google tells me must be 1996. This is followed by a delightful comic interlude in which Aziza celebrates her love of the film Titanic, so that will be 1997 then. The programme says the play ends in 2001, which is presumably the US invasion, but I’m not sure you would know without being told.
My inability to work out which year we were in sounds nit-picky but it is symptomatic of my problem with the play. Sarma has condensed a 400-page, multi-generational novel into a little over two hours of stage time. She seems unwilling to sacrifice any of the narrative, so we get a lot of exposition and a lot of characters whizzing on and off that enormous Rep main stage being born, instantly growing up and dying. A talented cast of nine play twenty-two characters between them, moving backwards and forwards across a fifty-year period. I assume in the novel the reader has time to get to know these people and to learn something of the political context, but on stage, they go by in a bit of a blur.
The action slows down in the last half an hour, which gives us a chance to connect with the characters, but for most of it, the jumpy timeline and the rapid turnover of characters makes it difficult to care.
The play ticks a lot of boxes. Female solidarity in the face of patriarchal oppression runs through it, and Rasheed’s decline into domestic violence is related to the brutality of the political regimes under which he lives. But it feels researched rather than lived. Kerena Jagpal, who plays Laila, was in Farrah Chaudhry’s play Community at The Rep earlier this year. Both plays present a faith-based community, but Chaudhry drew on her own experience and gave me an insight into a world I didn’t know, while Sarma’s play feels outsider-y. I wasn’t convinced she knew this world, and, as a result, I’m not sure I got to know it either.
It's well-played, though, and beautifully staged. Simon Kenny’s prayer mat set and Matt Haskins subtle, atmospheric lighting look gorgeous, Kuldip Singh-Barmi’s choreographed transitions help with the many flashback / jump forward transitions, and Elaha Soroor’s music evokes a sense of place without excessively over-orientalising the action.
A Thousand Splendid Suns is at The Rep until 3 May and then on tour to Nottingham and Leeds until June.