Party piece

The National Theatre could hardly resist Barber Shop Chronicles. The play shines a light on a disregarded ethnic community, black urban males, who like to hang around in barber salons seeking friendship, laughs and tittle-tattle. Setting the play in a single venue would just be a sitcom, like Desmond’s, so the show establishes a series of shops stretching from London to the capitals of various sub-Saharan nations. This makes it a global epic. In theory, at least. In fact, it’s still a sitcom with some melodramatic bits on the end. The disjoined structure is tiresome at first as the action keeps legging it from Britain to Nigeria and Ghana and back again.

Inevitably, the intellectual level is pretty undemanding, somewhere between music-hall and panto. The guys lounge around on chairs swapping jokes, telling old stories and haggling over politics. Some of the comments are amusing. On Africa’s disdain for punctuality: ‘Time cannot contain us!’ On black women’s obsession with wigs: ‘Why can our wives get away with murder? Because their DNA will be traced to a bald woman in India.’ There’s a great speech by an embittered South African who blames Mandela for his policy of reconciliation which left the black populace ‘emasculated’ and seething with unexpressed rage that manifests itself today in the ceaseless waves of violent crime.

The show’s big attraction is its party atmosphere. Before curtain-up, the cast jig around on stage or mingle with the audience. Afterwards, everyone is invited up for a disco. Director Bijan Sheibani has assembled some of the finest comic talents around. Hammed Animashaun is a superb vaudevillian and Sule Rimi delivers one of the best impersonations of affronted Nigerian masculinity you’ll ever see. The gameplan, presumably, is to draw black malesto the South Bank and to hope they’ll return for the classical repertoire.