Playwright Matthew Spangler writes for Culture about the challenges in adaptating Khaled Hosseini's acclaimed novel The Kite Runner for the stage - the production runs at The Gaiety Theatre, Dublin from from June 4th - 9th.
When I started writing the stage adaptation of The Kite Runner in the summer of 2006, strange as it might seem now, I had the Irish monologue play in mind.
Khaled Hosseini (author of the book) and I both live in the San Francisco Bay Area, where much of the story is set, and as soon as I read this beautiful novel, I thought it could make a great play. There’s so much in it – it’s a story about two best friends, a father/son story, a love story, a story about global politics, Afghanistan before the wars, and later, the refugee crisis, and immigration to California. But in the end, this is a simple story about regret and redemption, about a man begging the audience, and maybe even himself, to be forgiven for a terrible act he committed in his youth.
So why, as I put pen to paper in adapting The Kite Runner, as I started to write about an Afghan man and his father who leave Kabul as refugees and come to California, was my first impulse to model the play on the work of Irish playwrights? Specifically, I was thinking of the work of Tom Murphy, Brian Friel, and Mark O’Rowe.
It’s not completely out of left field. I did an MPhil in Theatre at Trinity College, Dublin in the late 1990s – I wrote my thesis on Yeats’s plays – and later, I wrote a PhD dissertation on adaptations of James Joyce’s fiction for the stage – as part of my doctorate, I even took a year of Irish language. Today, I teach courses in performance studies at San José State University in California, courses that involve a healthy dose of all things Irish.
It is a tremendous honor to see this play produced in the country that has meant so much to me as a writer and person over the years.
My publications, too, are overwhelmingly focused on Irish theatre, like my book Staging Intercultural Ireland (with Charlotte McIvor of NUI Galway), which is a collection of plays and interviews with theatre artists who are producing work about immigration to Ireland. So it’s fair to say Irish theatre is never far from my mind.
With regard to Kite Runner, I thought the intense first-person point of view of the book leant itself to a monologue play. I had recently seen Brian Friel’s Faith Healer on Broadway (in 2006), and Tom Murphy’s Bailegangaire and Mark O’Rowe’s Terminus at the Peacock Theatre (in 2002 and 2007, respectively), and I thought these plays might provide the model for a stage adaptation of Kite Runner.
I was on to something, but a few weeks into the writing process, it became clear that my play needed other characters on stage, so I gradually increased the cast size to twelve actors. But, if you look closely at Kite Runner, you can still see the original storytelling format, as the main character Amir moves back and forth from speaking directly to the audience to playing scenes on stage. In the end, it became a kind of hybrid monologue play.
The Kite Runner had its first performance in San José, California in 2007. Since then, it has been produced at theatres across the United States, Canada, Israel, and more recently, the UK, including London’s West End, and now, of course, Ireland.
It is a tremendous honor to see this play produced in the country that has meant so much to me as a writer and person over the years. The time I spent living in Dublin inspired me to dedicate my career to the literary and performing arts. And today, some of my oldest and dearest friends are in Ireland and I look forward to sharing this play with them.
Matthew Spangler will be speaking about about Kite Runner and the process of adapting literature for the stage at the Hinterlands Literary Festival in Kells on June 22 and 23 - more details here.
