Showing @ King’s Theatre, Edinburgh, until Sat 15 Nov @ 19:30

War is over, sang John Lennon, but war is never truly over. It shatters families and nations and leaves behind scars in the minds of survivors that most of cannot even imagine. In the week that remembers the dead of two world wars, The Kite Runner is a timely reminder of the moral ambiguities that surround international conflict; in this case, the war in Afghanistan.

Based on Khaled Hosseini‘s harrowing but inspirational bestseller and robustly adapted for the stage by Matthew Spangler, this is the story of two boys growing up in Kabul in the 1970s and what happens to them as the madness of civil war engulfs their country. One boy is rich, one poor; one Sunni, one Shi’ite. The motherless boys, the street bully, the paper kite game that helps close the abyss between father and son, and how one boy Amir (Ben Turner) betrays his best friend Hassan (Andrei Costin) to save his own skin and regrets it all his life, might have been mawkish mush in less skilful hands. This is provocative and gripping storytelling that traverses history and continents and is so bravely and confidently told it’s easy to forget the contrived major plot line.

Rape and betrayal are apt metaphors for what happened to Afghanistan – a proud country brought to its knees by internal strife. Sure-footed and sensitive direction from Giles Croft and inventive set, lighting and animated projection by Barney George, Charles Balfour and William Simpson (respectively) keeps the tension tightrope taut.