If you ever doubted the vital importance of barber shops pre-Covid-19, you now need only to contemplate the astounding queues of hairy men outside all those barbers on the stroke of midnight at the drop to Alert Level 2. I confess previously I’d thought of hairdressing salons as women-space, cosy gossip and pampering stations of warmth, perfume and glossy magazines, with sympathetic attendants akin to psychotherapists whose sole aim was to make us Feel Good. How narrow-minded of me. 

Naturally both genders have an inalienable right to Feel Good, but particularly for the black male living in a country that may not welcome him into masculine strongholds like public bars or sporting arenas, the barber shop is where he can feel safe as well as pampered. “Without fathers and exiled from our motherland,” says one, “we are orphans.” Once this fact registers, we know we are in for intimate confessions and possibly some deep delving into eternal truths. What we might not expect is the radiant good humour and sheer fun.

Writer Inua Ellams, who sees himself as a poet who sometimes has an idea for a play, himself found shelter in barber shops while working for years on this scintillating show, which is far more than a series of chatty vignettes. It is brought to pulsating life by director Bijan Sheibani, with twelve excellent actors who swiftly create 33 vivid characters, mime haircuts and shaves, and, wielding capes like toreadors, sing and dance up a storm.

Barber Shop Chronicles has been a wild success, the public so reluctant to let it go after its season at London’s National Theatre that it has transferred to the Roundhouse. It’s easy to see why. Enchantingly energetic, a visual and aural delight, packed with memorable and entertaining characters, it is full of insight too, examining the lives of African men while probing timeless issues.

The staging in the round is simple: a luminous globe of the world and neon barber shop signs suspended from the balconies, a few chairs spinning across the floor, and all around, the grinning faces of the audience, well warmed up by pre-show shenanigans. A snazzy variety of costume helps distinguish characters we have little time to absorb. My favourite is the elegant white suit of the Ugandan who paid 60 cows as bride dowry, and has come to complain about an in-growing hair.

The minimal scene changes are the perfect excuse for dazzling song and dance numbers that reference the country we will land in. Thanks to brilliant musical director Michael Henry, along with movement director Aline David, what could have been purely utilitarian interludes become highlights, from the irresistible Afro-beat for Uganda to the lovely choral harmonies for South Africa.

The scenes cut quickly between the barber shop in Peckham, London, and those in various African countries: Ghana, Nigeria, Uganda, South Africa and Zimbabwe. Black men in London may sound as Cockney as any Peckham barrow-boy yet still be seen as immigrants, but then so are the men who have shifted from South Africa to Zimbabwe and back again, searching for opportunities that ebb and flow with the swiftly changing politics of each country. These are all men struggling to find their own culture, that they may know their place in the world.

No holds barred, sometimes with humour, sometimes anger, they shout at sport on the ubiquitous televisions, tell awful jokes and discuss everything: national identity, child discipline, religion, alcohol, girlfriends, racism, even linguistics. Is ‘nigger’ more or less offensive than ‘kaffir’? What if you spell it ‘nigga’, is it reclaimed?

The main plot centres round the Peckham shop and Samuel, played by Akinade Hammed, who helpfully, amidst the cheery melee, wears a red hat. A talented barber himself, Sam is struggling to accept his father’s best friend as boss of the barbershop, believing this ‘uncle’ betrayed his father. The universal theme of the fundamental relationship of father and son finds an echo in many of the stories, cunningly connected, in the other shops, some funny, and some tragic. So many of these men lack a father figure they can look up to.

What I find most intriguing is the way this theme is amplified: suddenly we are talking not just broken families, but nations. Just as a boy may go from hero-worship of his father to bitter disillusionment, so many of the men see the leaders of their native countries, like Mugabe and even Mandela, as ultimate failures, who have disappointed the high hopes once held for them. One line in particular stays with me: “We live outside our countries, because our fathers, our leaders, failed us.”

I am spellbound from the hilarious opening, as an indignant barber, scratching one bared buttock, is knocked up at 6 am by a broke customer desperate for an ‘aerodynamic’ haircut to help him get a job, right to the very satisfying conclusion, which has me in tears.

With such an amazing and marvellously diverse cast, surely no audience member will miss the irony of the young London ‘actor’ who tells his barber he has been called to audition for ‘the strong black man’, as if there were one generic type.  “I don’t fit their idea of strong black masculinity,” he says sorrowfully. But he has expanded my vision.

Under other circumstances, Barber Shop Chronicles may not have seemed a play that would have much to offer a white woman living on the other side of the world, but thanks to National Theatre at Home’s generous sharing during Lockdown of this exhilarating, moving production, it has been a genuinely illuminating and humbling experience.

[See also review of the 2018 NZ Arts Festival season in Wellington.]

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