Barber Shop Chronicles (2018)

This was a great National Theatre Live production, a small play performed in the round that takes us through slices of life from around the African diaspora. What seems to begin as a series of floating vignettes is slowly connected through personal and cultural ties, and the whole thing comes together in surprising ways.

Over the course of a day, we drop in on Black barber shops in England, Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa, Uganda, and Zimbabwe. While men wait to get their hair cut, they shoot the shit, tell jokes, debate the upcoming Barcelona vs. Chelsea match, discuss oppression, and reveal details about their own histories. Similarities echo across the nations, and conversations that begin in the shop in one country seem to finish in another. Through it all, we are anchored within these community bedrocks.

Similar to National Theatre Live’s Jane Eyre, this is a show that creates its worlds inventively, economically – massive moving sets won’t do you much good in the round. Instead, each shop is established through its particular assortment of barber’s chairs, introduced by the ensemble singing and dancing out the names of the different cities where they are set. Actors make slight changes to their costumes onstage to pop up as different characters in different countries, changing their accents along with their hats.

At the onset, it may seem like a simple play told through conversations between barbers and customers, scenarios combined with thematic monologues and a dash of personal backstory. (Side note: even if this was “all” it was, it would still be a pretty engrossing play. I really enjoy seeing the various debates in the barber shop, such as the discussions over racial slurs or arguing over whether it’s racist to prefer dating either Black girls or white girls.) But as the play goes on, things become so rich and interconnected beyond the excellent qualities it’s displayed already. We see the same ideas filtered through different cultural lenses (debate over the N-word in England becomes a debate over the K-word in South Africa,) jokes whose subjects change depending on tribe affiliations. What’s more, with the diaspora, we see character ties carrying over from country to country, with the characters in England having family members or old family friends frequenting the barber shops in Nigeria or Uganda. And everyone, regardless of where they’re from, is invented in the outcome of the football (soccer) match.

The cast is strong, with, again, many of them playing multiple roles. No one jumped out as immediately familiar to me, although I had several “I know I’ve seen that face before” moments and consulted IMDb afterwards to recall which one had a minor role in Love, Actually or which ones guest starred on an episode of Doctor Who. For me, the most recognizable actor was Cyril I. Nri, who played the Shopkeeper on the Sarah Jane Adventures story “Lost in Time.”

Really great play with a lot of food for thought. Most of the National Theatre Live showings so far have featured famous plays, new plays based on famous source material, and/or plays featuring famous actors, and I really appreciated getting something so new and original.

Warnings

Language (including racial slurs,) drinking/drug references, sexual references, references to violence, and thematic elements.