The 2007 play The Kite Runner, a dutifully faithful adaptation of the bestselling novel by Khaled Hosseini, is back on a UK tour, stopping in at the Playhouse this week. To call it an epic tale would perhaps be an understatement: the story spans four decades, and addresses friendship, betrayal, war, class, rape, life as a refugee, the rise of the Taliban, culture shock, generational differences, marriage, adoption and of course, kite running. We meet our protagonist, Amir (Stuart Vincent), as a young boy growing up in 1970s Afghanistan. A wealthy Pashtun, Amir experiences far greater privileges than his best friend, Hassan (Yazdan Qafouri), the illiterate and poor son of his father’s servant. Still, the boys are inseparable and Hassan has a particular talent for kite running - telling where a kite will fall and retrieving it. Both boys are targets for bullying - specifically from a sadistic older boy, Assef (Bhavin Bhatt) - Amir for being introverted and passive, and Hassan for being part of the Hazara ethnic group.

The first scenes paint an idyllic and charming portrait of childhood as the boys play together mirrored by the peacefulness of the nation they are growing up in. This innocence comes to an abrupt end when Assef attacks and sexually assaults Hassan, and Amir does nothing to intervene, leaving him with a guilt that will come to define his life. Their trauma is then paralleled on a cultural level when the Russian invasion of Afghanistan leads Amir and his father to flee as refugees.

The above covers only the first act, and a mere fraction of the story. The same actors are used to portray their characters throughout, the adults playing children may require you to suspend your disbelief more than is comfortable (although this is so subjective - I find it distracting in plays, but many audience members don’t seem to mind).

The struggle of adapting an epic novel to stage is maintaining an emotional throughline. With a novel, chapters can be digested individually, leaving spaces for multiple moods with no emotional whiplash. One of the unique strengths of theatre, on the other hand, is the immediacy and chronology, the power of scenes build on themselves in real time. Vincent Stuart, playing Amir, was talented at portraying emotions moment to moment and shone in the funnier bits, but was unable to convey the increasing weight of the passing years on his character, seeming largely unchanged throughout the work.

At worst, the structure felt muddy in the way a poorly edited memoir does - the problem is not lack of plot, it’s lack of braiding those details into a meaningful through-line, and the story because more of a succession of thin vignettes.

For example, there’s a terrifying encounter between Amir’s father and a menacing trafficker en route, which would have felt profoundly tense in a novel or film, but on stage feels thin and momentary due to the lack of build-up to that scene.

A great deal of the exposition also feels lifted wholesale from the novel. At times the other actors are left to simply stand around while Amir sets the scene, giving the feel of a one-man show. Again, fine for a novel with a single protagonist, but dull in a stage show.

Another issue brought about by adapting is Amir’s passivity. His avoidance of conflict is a major theme in the story, but can make him a frustratingly stagnant character, and the focus on him primarily ends up feeling myopic in a way that makes both Hassan and Amir’s future wife, Soraya (Daphne Kouma), feel like props in his emotional development, rather than equally fleshed out characters.

With that all said, the accompanying music was phenomenal, hugely evocative without ever becoming overpowering. From traditional instruments - a tabla player seated onstage playing rhymes throughout, plus singing bowls, Schwirrbogen - to haunting songs being sung just offstage, it may be the best use of live music I’ve seen in a stage show.

The staging is also polished, clever and unobtrusive - a giant kite, split to lay flat, hangs on the backdrop of the stage and is used to project different tones and imagery to set scenes.

And despite my frustrations with aspects of Vincent’s performance, the acting is strong across the board. Dean Rehman, in particular, does a fantastic job as Amir’s father, bringing warmth and humour to a role that could have slipped into bland unlikability.

In short, I think this is a particularly tricky work to adapt to stage, and if you need drama to have character depth and focus and emotional cohesion, then you may find The Kite Runner sentimental and improbable, and struggle to find it as powerful or moving as it wants to be.

However, if you are a fan of sweeping stories that fearlessly touch on the darkest parts of life, and have dramatic conclusions and capital-T Themes, I’d urge you not to miss its visit to Oxford.