Birmingham Rep’s stage adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s novel A Thousand Splendid Suns broke box-office records and became one of the venue’s highest attended drama productions.
The Rep’s production, which was adapted by Ursula Rani Sarma, received standing ovations when it opened in April 2025, with more than 19,000 audience members going through the Rep’s door’s during the play’s three-week run.
A Thousand Splendid Suns attracted more than 14,500 people at Leeds Playhouse and 10,000 at Nottingham Playhouse, the two theatres that co-produced the show, making a total of more than 43,000 audience members across the UK.
Set in war-torn Afghanistan in 1992, A Thousand Splendid Suns is “the unflinching story of survival, resilience and strength of human spirit”. A number of Rep productions have embodied the theatre’s commitment to bringing South Asian stories to its stages, including Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s Marriage Material and Farrah Chaudhry’s Community.
Birmingham Rep chief executive Rachael Thomas said, “the audience response to A Thousand Splendid Suns was incredibly pleasing for us, with every performance sold out and our waiting lists at maximum capacity.
“Our aim at the Rep is to tell stories that are relevant to all the people of Birmingham and we were thrilled that this production resonated so deeply with our audiences and garnered such wonderfully positive comments after every performance.
“We attracted a lot of visitors who’d never previously been to the Rep, many of them afterwards telling us how much they’d enjoyed the whole experience. As a producing theatre, our hugely talented team built everything in the show—from the beautifully painted set to the props and costumes—in our own workshops here at the Rep. This production really proved that the Rep is a theatre for the whole city and all its residents.”