3 hours ago
5
I first saw Barber Shop Chronicles on National Theatre at Home. It was during the first lockdown in 2020 and I was trying to find some entertainment while I was furloughed. I was 26 and hadn’t seen a lot of theatre, but had heard good things about it on social media.
For the first five minutes or so the audience are milling around the barber shop set. You’re not really sure who’s an actor and who’s an audience member. But there’s a real sense of camaraderie, jokes and vibes – you really feel part of it. The setting is not exactly domestic, not exactly business. There wasn’t a raised stage so you felt invited, and then kind of zoomed, into the action.
You meet 33 characters played by 12 actors, all black men from across six different cities: Johannesburg, Kampala, Lagos, Harare, Accra and London. It did the human detail so well, I really believed in every single one of the characters. I did not know that theatre could really fly you to these destinations, all very specific and different to one another.
There is a central relationship, but it’s threaded through lots of other conversations between people in the different barber shops across these cities. They talk about sex, marriage, queerness, capitalism, football. I hadn’t known that could be put on stage, and it felt important. It wasn’t centring whiteness or over-explaining things to an assumed white audience.
I’m queer and non-binary and at the time I was figuring out gender stuff, so it was really affirming to see such a range of masculinity on stage and for it to be so tender and intimate.
The scenes transitioned as the chairs spun around – everyone was on wheels! – and there was music and beautiful choreography. It felt so powerful. I found out afterwards that the playwright, Inua Ellams, had recorded hours of interviews with people across those cities in real life, thinking precisely about the way that they expressed themselves, the tone and the vocabulary they used.
It reminded me of conversations I would have at home with my aunties, with my mum. I thought, “Oh, I could write about my Tamil-ness, and bring in the Tamil language and our customs and food and rituals, and it could be interesting and rich.”
I then started doing Zoom interviews with my mum and my elders, and recorded 20 hours of conversation that went on to shape my first play, Period Parrrty. I’d never asked my mum before about how she had migrated from Jaffna, from the Sri Lankan civil war. There is a silence around the war and the Tamil genocide but I was able to gently ask her to tell me stories while she was oiling my hair in the kitchen. As with Barber Shop, I was able to work in bits and pieces of verbatim dialogue. I’d never thought someone could put that on stage and I wouldn’t have had the confidence to do so without seeing this play.
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Gayathiri Kamalakanthan’s YA novel Bad Queer, illustrated by Chi Nwosu, is published by Faber on 26 March
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As told to Lindesay Irvine
