“Every street of Kabul is enthralling to the eye ... Impossible to count the moons shimmering on her roofs/And the thousand splendid suns hiding behind her walls.” Khaled Hosseini took the title for his 2007 novel from lines written by the 17th-century poet Saib Tabrizi. The action is set in Afghanistan in the years after the Soviet occupation, during the civil war and the rise of the Taliban. Poetry and brutality are the poles between which the storyline pulses, its epic narrative centring on the lives of Laila and Mariam, both bound in marriage to Rasheed.
Ursula Rani Sarma’s stage adaptation effectively parallels the rise in violence and misogyny inside and outside the women’s home. As Rasheed becomes increasingly despotic (an uncompromising performance by Pal Aron), so the women become more mutually reliant and resourceful. Amina Zia’s bitter, closed Mariam gradually finds her own strength and sense of self through her love for the younger wife, Laila, and her children; Sujaya Dasgupta’s Laila radiates hope even through the harshest experiences.
While the time-fluid plot is managed with clarity and flair, by director and performers, the dialogue and scenes, in the first half, come across as stilted: more information-pack than drama. The powerful story, though, drives the second half to its emotion-engaging conclusion. Roxana Silbert’s direction (in her final production as the Rep’s artistic director) is inventive and insightful, with poetry triumphing over brutality in the balanced pathos of the ending.
If Hosseini’s story seems a gulf away from today’s UK, we have only to look at our legal system’s flaccid reaction to statements made by Carl Benjamin about Jess Phillips MP to realise that the misogyny on which its events are based continues to exist here. It is closer to home than we might care to think.
