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.’