IF you missed The Kite Runner at the West Yorkshire Playhouse last September, or indeed at York Theatre Royal or the Playhouse in autumn 2014, then please make sure to see Giles Croft's production at the Grand Opera House this week.

Given the fractured, worsening state of relationships on the global playing field, Khaled Hosseini's story grows ever more prescient, and each time your reviewer has encountered this remarkable work a sense of impotent rage, despair and frustration grows too. History may repeat itself down the years, but not the play, because you watch with a different audience and experience anew the shattering impact of Californian playwright Matthew Spangler's superb adaptation.

Hosseini's story stares into the very soul of man, presenting our worst behaviour on the cold slab of the stage, and he is blessed with an ideal theatrical angel of enlightenment in Spangler, a professor of playwriting and theatre of immigration in San Jose, where Hosseini settled after leaving Afghanistan. The two have met and, to borrow an overused phrase, they are very much on the same page.

Played by adults, Afghanistani childhood friends Amir (Raj Ghatak, new for 2018) and Hassan (Jo Ben Ayed) are soon to be torn apart, like the triumphant kite "cutting" the line of the loser in the Kabul kite-flying tournament.

The innocence of playing cowboys, of sharing mythical stories, will disappear too as the boys become entangled in a web of betrayal and guilt in a male-dominated world of masters and servants, bullies and victims, where Amir's blossoming talents as a writer are not appreciated by his macho father, Baba (Gary Pillai). Reconciliation and redemption will come eventually, but what a terrible price has been paid, as Ghatak's Amir leads the story between his past and haunted present.

If this world is male dominated, so too is the cast, with only one principal player being female, namely Amiera Darwish in the roles of Soroya and Mrs Nguyen, but significantly Soroya has a wonderfully transformative influence on Amir, whose cowardly childhood behaviour had so damaged both Hassan and himself.

There is an honesty to the constantly present Amir, introducing scenes and stepping in and out of the story, that balances his faults and fallibilities with those of the men around him. This typifies the nuanced progression of Giles Croft's brutal yet humane production, which was first staged by the Nottingham Playhouse and Liverpool Everyman & Playhouse and has flown higher and higher through its West End runs and tours.

Barney George's designs, aided by William Simpson's projections, evoke the fiery heat of Afghanistan and the contrasting United States, as do William Simpson's projections. Jonathan Girling's compositions and Hanif Khan's musicianship on stage complement the weighty drama perfectly too. Ghatak is an excellent recruit for the 2018 tour, so too is Pillai, and the unbending devotion of Ayed's Hassan will tear at your heart, like the play itself in fact.

The Kite Runner, Grand Opera House, York, 7.30pm tonight and tomorrow; 2.30pm and 7.30pm, Saturday. Box office: 0844 871 3024 or at atgtickets.com/york