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.Performance dates
18 July - 24 August 2019
Run time 1hr 45min (no interval)
Includes interval
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Roundhouse Barber Shop Chronicles tickets London on sale now!
Inua Ellams' smash-hit play, Barber Shop Chronicles, returns to London for a limited run at the Roundhouse Theatre after a sold-out run at the National Theatre. Tickets for the Barber Shop Chronicles revival are bound to be among the hottest London theatre tickets of the summer. Be sure to book your tickets early to secure the best seats at the Roundhouse at the best prices.
What is the Barber Shop Chronicles play about?
For many African men, the barbershop is more than just a place to get a haircut. It’s also a place of gathering and a place to seek advice where the barbershop becomes a confession box and the barbers become wise men. While the concept of the African-American barbershop is certainly nothing new and has already been explored in both the Barbershop film series with Ice Cube and even Coming to America with Eddie Murphy, Barber Shop Chronicles is a fresh take that places African identity and African masculinity front and centre while avoiding African-American identity and US barbershops altogether.
Inua Ellams' heartwarming play, Barber Shop Chronicles, is set in six cities: Johannesburg (South Africa), Harare (Zimbabwe), Kampala (Uganda), Lagos, Accra (Ghana) and London, and it takes place over the course of one day with a thousand stories to tell. The play offers the unique experience for audiences to 'eavesdrop' on the many conversations that go on when the hair clippers buzz and the towels toss. Conversation topics range from a dead fly in one's beer and Nigerian pidgin to an ingrown hair, homosexuality, football, and women. Though you'll get an inside look at the lives of African men in six different cultural settings, the dynamics between the barber and the customer remain the same.
Quick-witted, exuberant and packed with outstanding dance and music, Barber Shop Chronicles is guaranteed to leave you mesmerised from start to finish.
More about Inua Ellams
Inua Ellams was born in Nigeria in 1984 and is a world-renowned poet, performer, playwright, and visual artist. As a poet, he has published four poetry collections entitled #Afterhours, Thirteen Fairy Negro Tales, The Wire-Headed Heathen, and Candy Coated Unicorns and Converse All Stars. As a playwright, his debut play The 14th Tale enjoyed a critically acclaimed run at the Edinburgh International Theatre Festival, which went on to win the award for Fringe First. Barber Shop Chronicles marks the Ellams' fourth play and boasts a sold-out run at the National Theatre in London. He has recently been touring The Half God of Rainfall, a play in verse, and An Evening With An Immigrant, and he currently resides in London, where he founded the nocturnal urban excursion, Midnight Run. Ellams serves as an ambassador for the Ministry of Stories and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Barber Shop Chronicles briefly explores the many challenges that Inua Ellams has faced in real life. At a young age, he and his family were forced to flee Nigeria and escape persecution after people grew angry of Ellam's father who had begun to question his Muslim faith. After three years in London, the family moved to Ireland where Ellams was subject to racism and bullied in school for being black. His difficulty in obtaining citizenship status at the age of 18 delayed his opportunity to study at university and he turned to writing and poetry to help cope. His poetry had soon become so widely known that when he was finally able to go to college, albeit still unable to due to a lack of education funds, his work was being taught at the university he wanted to attend. Ellams hopes to bring Barber Shop Chronicles to Broadway sometime in 2020.
Barber Shop Chronicles Roundhouse London cast
The Barber Shop Chronicles sees twelve actors take on the roles of 30 characters in this fourth play by Inua Ellams. The North London cast of Barber Shop Chronicles stars Adé Dee Haastrup, Anthony Ofoegbu, David Webber, Demmy Ladipo, Emmanuel Ighodaro, Maynard Eziashi, and Mohammed Mansaray from the original National Theatre production and will also star incoming actors Elmi Rashid, Eric Shango, Micah Balfour, Okorie Chukwu, and Tom Moutchi.
Barber Shop Chronicles Roundhouse tickets available now!
Don't miss out on tickets to Barber Shop Chronicles. This highly praised production is back in London at the Roundhouse this summer for a limited season. Book your tickets to see the Off-West End production of Barber Shop Chronicles early to avoid disappointment.
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
Recent Reviews
Excellent show. I highly recommend it.
A wonderful show, full of humour, creativity, fabulous music & authentic emotional insight! A great cast, too & wonderful use of the set/props. The audience participation was a touch of magic & fun!!
Very interesting production. Acting is superb. Script is universal.
I think the themes of the play are extremely relevant and the acting was outstanding. My only criticism as someone who isn't familiar with the accent of certain black nationalities is that I struggled to understand the them. It took some time to get used to the varies accents but when I did I experienced it as very moving and thought provoking.
Clever and hilarious! A must see!
Brilliant play with a fantastic cast. So much fun, laughter mixed with serious thought provoking narratives.... amazing!
The show was brilliant, the actors got the public warmed up at the beginning and the play itself was well scripted and funny at the same time. Food for thought and entertainment altogether, I recommend it.
A great production at The Roundhouse in Camden. Good vibes. Vibrant performance.
Brilliant play, entertaining and educating, for young people to see,
Good entertainment and talented actors make it an enjoyable piece of theatre.
We love your play,the cast was brilliant and we enjoyed the staging and pre dancing with the audience. We are from Toronto and hope you able to live stream it. I went to bed thinking about especially the final two scenes. Thanks for this!!! Aileen from Toronto
Awesome! Had so much fun!
Latest Barber Shop Chronicles News
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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
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