Barber Shop Chronicles is a heart-warming, hilarious and insightful play that leaps from a barber shop in Peckham to Johannesburg, Harare, Kampala, Lagos and Accra over the course of a single day.

Newsroom, political platform, local hot spot, confession box, preacher-pulpit and football stadium. For generations, African men have gathered in barber shops to discuss the world. These are places where the banter can be barbed and the truth is always telling. Barber Shop Chronicles, which was partly inspired by verbatim recordings, is a heart-warming, hilarious and insightful play that leaps from a barber shop in Peckham to Johannesburg, Harare, Kampala, Lagos and Accra over the course of a single day. It was first produced by the National Theatre, Fuel and Leeds Playhouse in 2017 and is here publishedas a Methuen Drama Student Edition with commentary and notes by Oladipo Agboluaje.

"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." - Observer

"Throbs with energy and heat. Full of sadness and great joy." - Daily Telegraph

"Rich and exhilarating. A fascinating peek into the barber shop." - The Stage

"Life-affirming" - Independent