Inua Ellams’ Barber Shop Chronicles examines men.

British-Nigerian playwright Inua Ellams says his hit play challenges stereotypical notions of African males.

Barbershop Chronicles is set in six barber shops across London and Africa. Picture Marc Brenner

In popular culture, hairdressing salons have traditionally been portrayed as a kind of collective female confessional. From British soap Coronation Street to Hollywood film Steel Magnolias, the world of set perms and turbocharged dryers has been portrayed as a space where women pour out their hearts to a trusted hairdresser.

Nigerian-British playwright, poet, performer and graphic designer Inua Ellams reckons barber shops perform a similar role for black men — as a meeting place, football stadium (with a Champions League soccer match invariably being broadcast in the background) and a centre for news, gossip, banter and “rudimentary counselling’’.

In a phone interview with Review, the award-winning London-based dramatist says his interest in barber shops was piqued by a 2009 mental health project in Britain that “never quite got off the ground’’. The program was aimed at teaching barbers “very basic’’ counselling skills so they could detect whether a client was experiencing psychological problems. It failed to secure funding “but the idea stayed with me’’, Ellams says.

Barbershop Cronicles playwright Inua Ellams. Picture: Oliver Holmes

Some years later, the self-taught polymath, who was born in Nigeria, set out to write a play about African men and their barber-shop confessions and rituals, based on interviews with barbers and their clients in London and Africa.

His research took him to barber shops in Nigeria, Uganda, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Kenya and Ghana. “I also spent time in barber shops in London — quite a few of them. I spent time just talking to men about what they thought it meant to be men,’’ he explains.

In Africa, he interviewed a man who had paid an exceptionally high bride price of 60 cows for his wife but didn’t believe in romantic love; he also talked to men who lamented an absence of male role models — including fathers — in their lives; men who dared question the burnished legacy of former South African president Nelson Mandela.

The resulting play, Barber Shop Chronicles, unfurls over the course of a single day and is set in six barber shops across London and Africa. It premiered at London’s National Theatre in June, where it wowed critics and sold out.

Boasting sharp, choreographed moves and a pre-performance warm-up in which audience members are invited on stage for free hair consultations, the show returned for an encore season at the National in November and sold out a second time.

A co-production with the independent Fuel company and the West Yorkshire Playhouse, Barber Shop Chronicles will shortly be staged as part of the Sydney and Perth festivals, with the Australian season kicking off at Sydney’s Seymour Centre on January 18.

Ellams says his play challenges narrow, stereo­typed notions of African males as dangerous or untrustworthy.

“Barber Shop Chronicles counters that,’’ he says. “It just shows black men for who they are. Just that fact is what celebrates them. It’s also important, I think, that the play celebrates that in a very natural, honest way. It doesn’t belabour the point; it just shows the men for who they are and the ways in which they are not depicted [in the media, film and cinema].’’

As actors skid around manically on chairs on castors, jokes are cracked, homespun wisdom about the relative merits of dating white women and black women is shared, and tensions are ratcheted up between key characters.

At the play’s heart is the Three Kings barber shop in London, where a young barber named Samuel works for salon owner Emmanuel who, like Ellams, is from Nigeria. Believing his father was cheated out of his stake in the barber shop, Samuel bristles with resentment — clearly, there are secrets between him and his boss that will be prised open as the narrative develops.

Robert Mugabe is mentioned, and after the Zimbabwean president was recently forced from office, Ellams had to quickly update these lines for the play’s second London outing. Interestingly, the workalso questions whether Mandela sold out to whites when he helped bring an end to apartheid in South Africa in the 1990s.

While conducting research in South Africa, Ellams found that locals often raised the issue of “what was sacrificed in the name of peace. I just reflected on these in the play.’’

In particular, the South Africans he met questioned how Mandela is “the darling of the Western political gaze’’. They wondered why he was commonly portrayed as “a docile figure who travelled the world preaching peace. At the same time, he had been a rebel leader. They just questioned why that was, and the ultimate legacy of his presidency.’’

Barbershop Chronicles challenges stereotypes. Picture Marc Brenner

Ellams is only 33, but Barber Shop Chronicles is his third play to be staged at the National Theatre; he has also performed his works in Perth, rural Western Australia, Sydney and Melbourne. He has described his plays, which often explore issues of displacement and identity, as “failed poems’’.

He began writing for the stage after working as a graphic designer and poet, and although he has crafted 14 plays, he sees himself as “primarily a poet’’. His poetry is influenced by the classics (especially Keats) and hip hop, and his titles include the evocatively titled Candy Coated Unicorns and Converse All Stars and The Wire-Headed Heathen.

It is no surprise, then, that his plays typically begin as poetic concepts. He knows he has a play on his hands when he finds the subject matter is best served by the competing voices and perspectives that can be played out on stage.

Although he won’t be visiting the Sydney or Perth festivals, he spent time in both cities earlier this year, performing his one-man show An Evening with an Immigrant, an intensely personal account of his often unsettled experience of migration. A melange of anecdotes, music and hip hop-inflected poems, this monologue relates how his family escaped fundamentalist Islam in Nigeria in the 1990s (his mother is Christian, his father a Muslim) and fled to London, only to spend 14 years trying to resolve their immigration status.

In 2011, as Ellams’s profile as a poet and playwright grew, he was invited to Buckingham Palace to meet the Queen. Yet even then, his British residency and work rights remained under a cloud. He has since secured long-term residency, but his status has to be renewed (at considerable cost) every two to three years.

Action from the Barbershop Chronicles. Picture Marc Brenner

Ellams tells Review that when he arrived in London in the mid-90s, aged 12, “some people accepted me, some didn’t. London was pretty multicultural at the time and there were lots of people of colour, lots of black kids in the school that I attended.’’

That changed, however, when his family moved to Dublin three years later. There, he was the only black child in a white school. He has said “the racism of those years was exhausting but character-building’’.

He returned to London aged 18, a “ball of angst’’ with a fragmented identity — he was part Christian, part Muslim, part Irish, English and Nigerian; even his horoscope was on the cusp of Libra and Scorpio. “Surprise, surprise I started writing poetry,’’ he likes to joke.

Unable to go to university because of his uncertain immigration status, he started performing his poetry at 19. He still works as a designer and graphic artist, and earlier this year published his fourth book of poetry, #Afterhours.

So what drew this young master of multiple art forms to the stage? He says that “now and then’’ he likes to tell big stories, while reaching “as diverse and as large an audience as possible’’. His first play, The 14th Tale, followed his eventful journey from Nigeria to England and won a Fringe First Award at the 2009 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, before being picked up by the National.

In 2012, the National staged Black T-shirt Collection, a one-man show about two foster brothers whose T-shirt business takes them from their Nigerian home town to the nightclubs of Europe and — ominously — the sweatshops of China. Ellams staged this show at the Sydney Writers Festival in 2014 and in Melbourne last September.

He told British website The Stage that his 2015 play, An Evening with an Immigrant, evolved almost accidentally: “I decided to string together some poems and mildly witty banter … the show was so scratchy and so scattered that I was changing poems two minutes before the lights went up.’’ The next day a reviewer called it an exceptionally powerful commentary on immigration. “I thought, ‘wow’, because all I’d done was sit on a bar stool on stage.’’

With Brexit and the huge influx of asylum-seekers and migrants into Europe, immigration was suddenly a hot topic. Ellams has since toured this show outside London as well as to Australia. He believes there has been a turning against immigration “right across the Western world pretty much’’ from Australia to Poland to the US. “The underlying reasons are capitalism and the dying of the old regime,’’ he says in his rhythmical, sometimes conspicuously formal language. “The old fathers and grandfathers of these countries are steeped in a colonialist mentality … They want to keep it in place.’’

Meanwhile, “the internet has broken down borders in ways we never imagined. People are speaking to each other, understanding each other, supporting each other and borders are increasingly ridiculous concepts. But they [governments] are holding on to these things and creating these deep barriers for humanity.’’ Migration, he argues, “is the oldest human habit’’.

A born innovator, he is a founder of Midnight Run walks, six or 12-hour walking tours that bring strangers together to explore major cities by night, with rest stops to listen to poetry or practise tai chi. These nocturnal expeditions began in London in 2005 and have spread to Paris, Barcelona, Rome and Perth.

“I trained five individuals to help to plan the walks a few years ago, so there’s a larger contingent of midnight runs,’’ Ellams says. He downplays the idea that lasting friendships are formed from these encounters. “We don’t really try to manage relationships and manage communities after the night. Our goal is to create a community to migrate through a city for one night only, introducing them to our friends and creating a mobile community.’’

Ellams once said: “I was born a man and it was only when I came to England that I became a black man.’’ He knows many Africans have had the same experience, and that is one reason they treasure barber shops as places where they can be themselves.

Asked why Barber Shop Chronicles has resonated so strongly with audiences, the playwright responds: “I’m never really sure. I think part of being a writer is writing into blank spaces, into the unknown, and hoping that an audience finds resonance with your compassion.’’

Barber Shop Chronicles opens at Sydney’s Seymour Centre on January 18 and at Perth’s Octagon Theatre on February 9.