Compulsively convivial man-sized view of the world
Barber Shop Chronicles
To walk into the auditorium before the start of Inua Ellams’s new play is to walk into a space teeming with life. We’re in a barber shop full of African men chatting, cutting hair, joshing with the audience and chilling to music. A Champions League final between Chelsea and Barcelona is on the TV; the late American rapper Tupac is on the stereo. It’s instantly, compulsively convivial. Inua Ellams has always explored ideas of masculinity and migration through his plays and slam poetry performances. Here, he pushes those themes onto a global stage, braiding together conversations in six barbershops, from London to Lagos to Johannesburg, across the course of a single day.
The barbershop has a similar function to a pub: a place to chat, argue, pass the time, be a man. Here, under the muscular flair of director Bijan Sheibani, it also becomes a setting for street theatre populated by poseurs, heroes, thieves, thinkers and lovers. A place where, like a new hair cut, many of these men try on different ideas of African masculinity for size.
Ellams has an instinctive feel for the polyphonous rhythms of dialogue, and the way his characters use language is both a texture and a theme of this play, which threads in debates on Nigerian Pidgin and the use of the N word with casual ease. Sheibani skilfully maintains control of his sprawling cast, although only slowly do individual relationships become distinct and characters gain depth and pathos.
In London, young Samuel (Fisayo Akinade) harbours a seething grudge
The barbers hop is a setting for street theatre populated by poseurs, heroes, thieves, thinkers and lovers
against his father’s friend Emmanuel, who has taken over his barbershop while Samuel’s father is in prison. In Johannesburg, Simphiwe (Patrice Naiambana) drinks away his rage against the still-festering inequalities of apartheid and his estranged father. The legacy of slavery hums in the air, but so does the theme of absent fathers, underpinning the complicated relationship between many of these men and their homelands. If errant fathers have let these sons down, Ellams suggests, then, from Mugabe to Mandela, so have their leaders.
Ellams can’t always prevent these conversations from feeling a bit forced but such shortcomings are more than compensated for by the sinewy pulse and lissom beauty of Sheibani’s production, which throbs with energy and heat.
A hypnotic use of song signifies each shift in location, while his crack cast move with limber grace. This is a show full of sadness and great joy.
At the NT until July 8 (020 7452 3000; nationaltheatre.org.uk), then at the West Yorkshire Playhouse from July 12-29