Theatre: The Barbershop Chronicles ★★★

Inua Ellams
Directed by Bijan Sheibani
Designed by Rae Smith
Music by Michael Henry
Octagon Theatre until Feb 18

It’s a fertile premise: barbershops – the old-school ones where men gathered for more than just a haircut – can be places where tall tales and true are swapped, confidences made and broken, deals done and undone and secrets kept and exposed.
The British poet and playwright, Inua Ellams, was intrigued by a project where barbers were taught basic counselling techniques to apply in their shops and with their customers. He employed these ideas in an imagined barbershop in his native Lagos, Nigeria, and others across the parts of Africa that Britain painted pink; in Accra, Ghana, Kampala, Uganda, Johannesburg, South Africa and Harare, Zimbabwe.

Topping and tailing these stories and connecting them to the broader post-colonial experience is a story of intergenerational tension and reconciliation set in an immigrant community in London.
The play begins in exuberant style, with the12 members of the all-male cast bantering and dancing, among themselves and with members of the audience who came down for a (pretend) cut. The music – grime, rap, reggaetón and RnB  (compiled by Michael Henry and designed by Gareth Fry) is propulsive, compelling and, happily, well cranked up, and the set (by the illustrious Rae Smith) is a fascination in itself.
The scenes where music – recorded or sung by the cast – and dancing feature are great highlights of the play.
I can’t always say the same of the scenes without them.
Ellams is primarily a poet, and a playwright for a single voice (he performed his solo Conversations with an Immigrant at last year’s Perth Festival), and Barbershop Chronicles doesn’t play to his strengths.
Ruminations about everything from the rights and wrongs of Robert Mugabe and Nelson Mandela, or when, and by whom, it’s acceptable or unacceptable to call an African man a negro, a nigger, a nigga or a kaffir, the importance of pidgin in allowing people of different countries and, often, languages, to communicate, or the inequalities of the post-Apartheid economy in South Africa can all work much more naturally in a solo piece.
Shoehorned into dialogue, as they often are in this play, made it rambling, disjointed and ultimately lumbering, no matter how valid and well written they are.
It also presents issues of characterization and performance intensity that even this strong cast often struggles to overcome.
Added to these problems is the story’s movement from location to location. While the stagecraft of director Bijan Sheibani and his creative team can’t be faulted, and while the cast handled them with smooth skill, the settings and their characters aren’t differentiated enough to easily distinguish. There were also some acoustic issues in the full-house Octagon Theatre that makes some dialogue hard to follow, especially when it is – legitimately and authentically – heavily accented.
All of which makes total comprehension of what is going on, and where, require too much concentration. That, inevitably, reduces engagement with the story by the audience.
Which is a shame. There’s much power in Barbershop Chronicles, and some high entertainment too, and these are stories well worth the telling.
The play and this production have engendered high praise and enthusiasm wherever it has been performed. I suspect something of the same here, and it's easy to understand why that will be.
I’m afraid, though, that I don’t completely share it.