Barber Shop Chronicles

Barber Shop Chronicles
By Inua Ellams. Fuel / National Theatre / West Yorkshire Playhouse / Sydney Festival. Seymour Centre, York Theatre. January 18 - 28, 2018. Perth Festival February 9 - 18, 2018

Barber Shop Chronicles from Nigerian-British writer Inua Ellams is surely the hit of the Sydney Festival.

His Chronicles check in on what African men are talking about in barber shops across Johannesburg, Lagos, Harare, Accra, Kampala and south London.

We return to some places, some ongoing stories, and the settings are masterfully linked by a nail-biting international soccer match, a repeated joke about three men in a pub and a powerful theme of men cut off from their fathers.

This African diaspora of experience is suggested by the shining world globe hanging above, amidst garlands of lights and local barber shop advertising amiably fanning out into the cavernous space of the Seymour’s York Theatre.  On its thrust stage, designer Rae Smith adds a clutter of cheap barber shop furniture.

Too much of the black banter and strut of dialogue from these 12 fine and varied actors is lost in this theatre. But you’re certainly on the edge of your seat trying to catch it all.

Director Bijan Sheibani creates a joyous swirl of song, chanting or dancing as the actors regroup for each new setting.  And each is played out without sentimentality, conversations sometimes petty and posturing and teasing, other times rich in male bonding and intimacy as well as spirted argument.

They leap through social welfare, pidgin English, gays in Uganda, how may cows for a good wife, the difference between white and black women (the whites apparently are meaner but less dutiful to family) and their fathers.

And talking of Dads, Ellams’s masterstoke of metaphor finally introduces men briefly returned to South Africa or Zimbabwe, and disappointed at their fathers, both real and national (like the fatherland legacies of Mandela and Mugabe).   

The search for a model of strong black manhood is movingly articulated at the end of this wonderful show piece.

Martin Portus 

Photographer: Prudence Upton

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