Remembrance of things past

The Kite Runner, a novel by Khaled Hosseini, has sold more than 30 million copies worldwide. Now it arrives on the West End stage, a doggedly efficient piece that somehow lacks true dazzle. The narrative style involves thick wodges of plot being delivered at the audience like news bulletins on the half-hour. The emotional range is limited and the characters never challenge our expectations.

The setting is Kabul in the 1970s. We meet nice Amir, a personable everyman, whose family have foreseen the rise of theocratic despotism and are plotting to escape. We hope they do. We’re attracted to Amir’s garrulous, whisky-drinking dad. ‘All crime is a form of theft,’ he philosophises. We find the psychotic street bully Assef utterly appalling. We feel sorry when Amir’s friend Hassan is raped by a gang of muggers. We share in Amir’s guilt when he admits that he witnessed the crime but failed to prevent it. When Amir moves to America we’re pleased to see him thrive. And we fear for him when he returns to Kabul in the 1990s and finds psychotic Assef transformed into a beheader of his fellow Muslims who flaunts his blood-stained sleeves as a badge of honour. Assef is still appalling. Amir is still nice. Not much has changed. Not enough, certainly, to move or astonish us.

Multicultural junkies will extol this play as an example of integration at its best. But Amir’s odyssey occurred 40 years ago and there are striking differences between him and his successor migrants. His view of Islam is essentially secular. He’s like a church-shy Brit who regards Anglicanism as a decorative irrelevance that provides a few reassuring background details for the transitional rites of birth, marriage and death.