Barber Shop Chronicles

Inua Ellams was born in Nigeria and is an internationally touring poet, playwright, performer, graphic artist and designer. He is an ambassador for the Ministry of Stories and has published four books of poetry: Candy Coated Unicorns and Converse All Stars, Thirteen Fairy Negro Tales, The Wire-Headed Heathen and #Afterhours. His first play, The 14th Tale, was awarded a Fringe First at the Edinburgh International Theatre Festival and his fourth play, Barber Shop Chronicles, sold out its run at the National Theatre. He is currently touring An Evening With An Immigrant and working on The Half God of Rainfall – a new play in verse. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.Oladipo 'Dipo' Agboluaje is a British-Nigerian playwright and academic, born in Hackney and educated in Britain and Nigeria. He studied Theatre Arts at the University of Benin, Nigeria, and later wrote a doctoral thesis at the Open University, UK, on West and South African drama. He won the Alfred Fagon prize for playwriting for his play Iya-lle and is a Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund, working in partnership with the University of East London, UK.

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.

• CHRONOLOGYCOMMENTARYPLAYWRIGHTCONTEXTBlack British drama (including work of practitioners such as Roy Williams, debbie tucker green and Mojisola Adebayo)THEMESMasculinity (including sport and sexuality) and how it shapes characters and subverts universal and specifically black and African notions of masculinityGENREVerbatim theatre (use of transcripts to create a work of fiction); comparing to other verbatim plays such as London Road and The Permanent WaySETTINGBarbershop as a 'safe space' for black menDiasporic movements - how the play's transnational locations construct a 'black' identityPLAY TEXTFURTHER READING