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Barber Shop Chronicles
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Description
Newsroom, political platform, local hot spot, confession box, preacher-pulpit and football stadium. For generations, African men have gathered in barber shops to discuss the world. These are places where the banter can be barbed and the truth is always telling.
Barber Shop Chronicles, which was partly inspired by verbatim recordings, is a heart-warming, hilarious and insightful play that leaps from a barber shop in Peckham to Johannesburg, Harare, Kampala, Lagos and Accra over the course of a single day.
It was first produced by the National Theatre, Fuel and Leeds Playhouse in 2017 and is here publishedas a Methuen Drama Student Edition with commentary and notes by Oladipo Agboluaje.
Table of Contents
COMMENTARY
PLAYWRIGHT
CONTEXT
Black British drama (including work of practitioners such as Roy Williams, debbie tucker green and Mojisola Adebayo)
THEMES
Masculinity (including sport and sexuality) and how it shapes characters and subverts universal and specifically black and African notions of masculinity
GENRE
Verbatim theatre (use of transcripts to create a work of fiction); comparing to other verbatim plays such as London Road and The Permanent Way
SETTING
Barbershop as a 'safe space' for black men
Diasporic movements - how the play's transnational locations construct a 'black' identity
PLAY TEXT
FURTHER READING
Product details

Published | 12 Aug 2021 |
---|---|
Format | Ebook (PDF) |
Edition | 1st |
Extent | 136 |
ISBN | 9781350200159 |
Imprint | Methuen Drama |
Series | Student Editions |
Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
About the contributors
Reviews
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Isn't this what all playwrights would wish for? To come across in their daily lives a dramatic arena. To find it both immediate and far-reaching. To put on stage lives that have not been seen there before ... [The] chronicles are set in Lagos, Johannesburg, Harare, Accra, Kampala – and south London. They include confessionals, politics, feuding, tales of men away from their homes, men cut off from fathers, men in search of companionship. Common threads – a plot about father and son, a joke about a fly in a drink, a big Barcelona-Chelsea match – weave these episodes together. But it is the stretch of the talk and material that is remarkable: anecdotal and argumentative.
Susannah Clapp, Observer
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Throbs with energy and heat. Full of sadness and great joy.
Daily Telegraph
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Rich and exhilarating. A fascinating peek into the barber shop.
The Stage
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Life-affirming
Independent