Reviews of A New Kind Of Wilderness, The Marching Band, Good One and Magic Farm by MARIA DUARTE, ANDY HEDGECOCK and MICHAL BONCZA
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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
SCOTT ALSWORTH foresees the coming of the smaller, leaner, and class conscious indie studio, with art as its guiding star
MARJORIE MAYO recommends an accessible and unsettling novel that uses a true incident of death in the Channel to raise questions of wider moral responsibility
MIK SABIERS wallows in a night of political punk and funk that fires both barrels at Trump
Reasonable radicalism, death in Abu Dhabi, locked-room romance, and sleuthing in the Blitz
SIMON DUFF recommends a new album from renowned composer and oud player Anour Brahem.
JAMES WALSH has a great night in the company of basketball players, quantum physicists and the exquisite timing of Rosie Jones
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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