The Birmingham Rep – until 3rd May 2025
Reviewed by Nadia Dodd
5*****
A Thousand Splendid Suns is based on the book by Khaled Hosseini, and 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 up in Kabul, the young Laila’s family is packing up to seek refuge until 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. Including getting to know Mariam’s husband Rasheed.
The play flashes back to Mariam’s childhood and jump forward to Aziza and Zalmai grown up, over the performance and covers a lot of ground and Afghan history.
You are never really told what years the play is based although depending on your age you can roughly work out some of the information yourself. There is a delightful comic interlude in which Aziza celebrates her love of the film Titanic, which led me to approx. 1997. The programme says the final scene unfolds in 2001 although this is not spoken about on stage.
After reading the book many years ago, I thought the play by Ursula Rani Sarma has been put together so well, obviously you are unable to really get to know the characters in as much detail in the play compared to the book although the flashback and jump forward scenes were easily followed and just flowed perfectly.
The staging designed by Simon Kenny, was a whole carpet filling the entire stage. Used for characters to pray on, sit on eating food with family or even entertaining guests. It worked perfectly no matter what was happening on stage at the time. The atmospheric lighting was simply gorgeous.
A tough watch at times with scenes of violence, domestic and sexual abuse and of course war, this is also why it wouldn’t be advised to be viewed by the younger audience.
Watching the relationship develop between Laila and Mariam both woman who have been thrown together was beautiful, helping each other eventually in deciding to flee their evil and controlling husband Rasheed. Mariam had a great sense of humour in some scenes raising some light-heartedness’ with the audience.
The standing ovation, the applause and cheers showed the nine cast members how much we had all be engrossed in the scenes that had unfolded in front of our eyes for the past 2 hours plus.
A fantastic production, suffering and resilience, tears and laughter, sadly many women have lived and still live like this. I would recommend that you also take tissues along to the show there are teary moments a plenty.