Barber Shop Chronicles Tickets
Nigerian-born playwright Inua Ellams takes his Barber Shop Chronicles back to London after a hit run at the National Theatre.Keep me updated
We'll tell you as soon as tickets go on sale:
Performance dates
18 July - 24 August 2019
Run time 1hr 45min (no interval)
Includes interval
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ONE DAY. SIX CITIES. A THOUSAND STORIES.
For generations, African men have gathered in barber shops. Sometimes they have haircuts, sometimes they listen, more often than not they talk. Barber shops are confession boxes, political platforms, preacher-pulpits and football pitches... places to go for unofficial advice, and to keep in touch with the world.
Fuel has produced Inua Ellams’ work for theatre since his debut play nine years ago. Barber Shop Chronicles is a heart-warming, hilarious and insightful play, set in Johannesburg, Harare, Kampala, Lagos, Accra and London. The play invites the audience into a uniquely masculine environment where the banter may be barbed, but the truth always telling.
The barbers of these tales are sages, role models and father figures, they are the glue that keeps men together.
★★★★'This wonderful new play is a revelation' The Times (National Theatre 2017)
Co-commissioned by Fuel and the National Theatre. Development funded by Arts Council England with the support of Fuel, National Theatre, Leeds Playhouse, The Binks Trust, British Council ZA, Òran Mór and A Play, a Pie and a Pint.
Special notes
For tickets in rear stalls: Latecomers will be admitted at a suitable break in the performance
For tickets in front stalls: There is one latecomers point 25 minutes into the show
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Features
Top 5 stage plays by Inua Ellams ranked
Inua Ellams is the next big thing amongst emerging playwrights, offering new perspectives and stories that are rarely seen on stage. Perhaps Ellams' most striking attribute, and most unique, is that he is a poet first and a playwright second — many of his stage plays begin as poems until the concepts for them become so complex that they warrant full-fledged characters and dialogue.
However, these self-described 'failed poems' aren't the only attribute that makes Inua Ellams one of the premier playwrights to look out for. Like Natasha Gordon in Nine Night and Arinzé Kene in Misty, Inua Ellams is also a playwright who's known to act in his own self-penned works, the likes of which include Black T-shirt Collection (2012), Knight Watch (2012), The 14th Tale (2009), and his 2010 piece, Untitled. Ellams is also not afraid to speak the harsh truth — in 2017 he admitted in an interview, "I became a black man when I arrived in England", which is a concept he frequently explores in his work, including in one of his most personal plays, Barber Shop Chronicles (2017), which is soon to be opening at London's Roundhouse Theatre on 18 July 2019 for a strictly limited run.
Now with a sizeable body of work under Ellams' belt, we're ranking the Nigerian-British playwright's best pieces to date. Here are our picks for the top five plays written by Inua Ellams.
15 Jul, 2019 | By Nicholas Ephram Ryan Daniels