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Barber Shop Chronicles, National Theatre at Home
Life-affirming narratives in a beautifully realised male preserve
LUMINOUS: The cast of Barber Shop Chronicles
[Marc Brenner]
SIMON DUFF relishes the cross contamination of Damien Hirst’s greatest hits by street artists from France and the US
In view of the grooming gangs inquiry, SIMON PARSONS feels the relevance of this powerful examination of trauma suffered at Medomsley Youth Detention Centre
JOHN GREEN doubts the motivations of a US war photographer who never questions why, or for whom, she is producing images of imperialist conflict
MARIA DUARTE reviews Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, Hedda, The Mastermind, and Regretting You
TONY CONWAY welcomes a thrilling and concise history of Hope not Hate, that is also a manual full of tactical advice
PAUL DONOVAN welcomes an inspiring account of living with deafness that has important lessons for the treatment of deaf people in today’s UK
EVEN before lockdown, NT Live was bringing great theatre to a significantly wider audience than previously possible and now its free streamings offer more of the same, among them Inua Ellams’s Barber Shop Chronicles.
The barber’s shop, we're told, is “where men come to be men” and this play is a chance to bask in an exclusively masculine world — a novel and refreshing setting at a time when the cause of women is the more common concern.
Heart-warming, affectionate, amusing and life affirming, the characters are all African, or at least of that extraction. In a continent as huge as Africa, those lineages are as diverse and nuanced as it is possible to imagine — among them here Nigerian, Zimbabwean, Cameroonian and Ghanaian — while some are Jamaican and others embrace Britishness.
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