The first preview of Barber Shop Chronicles was a night Inua Ellams will never forget. Set in an African-Caribbean barbershop on the night Chelsea beat Barcelona in the 2012 Champions League semi-final, it had been tentatively scheduled for a brief run at the National Theatre’s Dorfman auditorium in the summer of 2017. But as the all-male cast took their bow it was clear they had a hit on their hands. “We couldn’t believe the ovation, the noise,” Ellams says. “We stepped out of the theatre asking ourselves: ‘What just happened. What have we done?’ The love it has, and keeps on having, has been the most humbling thing.”
Hailed by Michael Billington as one of the 25 best plays of the decade, it was showered with praise on a nine-venue outing to the US and Canada, and has now set off on a nationwide UK tour. But when we meet on the South Bank, where it all began, Ellams has other things on his mind. He is struggling to persuade his mobile phone, nicknamed Maud, to help in publicising his newest work, a verse narrative called The Half God of Rainfall, which was born simultaneously as a book and a play this month. While he’s confident the play will look after itself, he’s not so sure about the book – and he’s not taking any chances. “Naija no dey carry last,” he quips – a pidgin slogan he roughly translates as “Nigerians strive to finish first”.
Zinging with energy in his Zanna Bukar Nigerian cap, it’s not hard to see how this slight 34-year-old man has become one of the UK’s most dynamic cultural impresarios, with a hand in everything from exuberant rap parties and interactive film screenings to all-night ambulant workshops that he calls “midnight runs” and has franchised in several parts of the world. Far harder is to work out how all his activity leaves any time for writing. “Maud helps,” he says, waving his phone, which is currently gestating a book-length poetry project called “Fuck 45” that began as an anti-Trump rant, composed in spare minutes on buses, trains or planes, or any other gap that might open up in his schedule.
The Half-God of Rainfall is an epic in miniature: a rhetorically charged story of Zeus’s defeat by an alliance of abused women, from Hera to Helen of Troy, headed by Modupe, a Nigerian market trader of exceptional grace and athleticism whom the Greek thunder god once attacked. The half-god of the title is the child of that rape – a basketball champion whose hubristic ambition carries him from Nigeria to the US and on to the 2012 London Olympics in defiance of the jealous deities.
The story’s origins, Ellams explains, go right back to the Plateau boarding school, in Nigeria’s highlands, where he spent a riotously happy couple of pre-teen years. “There was this boy whose party trick was to spit as high as he could and catch it in his mouth, which sounds gross, but I invented this name for him – the Half-God of Rainfall – and my teacher really liked it.” Prototypes of this friend and a Promethean basketball player appeared in his lively 2011 pamphlet Candy Coated Unicorns and Converse All Stars.
The more he thought about Zeus, the more it struck him that the Greek god’s son, Hercules, was a forerunner of the superheroes he had idolised during his own comics-obsessed childhood. His interest deepened when he began to research thunder gods and discovered hundreds of them in pantheons around the world, not least west Africa’s own Yoruba one: “Of course they exist everywhere there is thunder – the Chinese alone must have a couple of hundred.” He also discovered that Zeus was “a serial sex offender – so any revenge on him could also be revenge for his numerous victims.”
In order to defeat Zeus, Modupe has to match his violence and ruthlessness. Central to Ellams’s project, through four poetry collections and four plays, is a reckoning with forms of oppression, often centred on gender. To research Barber Shop Chronicles, he travelled across Africa with his microphone, recording 60 hours of male banter in six countries for an intimate and touching conversational piece that undercuts stereotypes of black masculinity.
The success of Barber Shop Chronicles might lead those unfamiliar with Ellams’s work to assume he is most comfortable in the world of men when in fact, he points out, the opposite is the case. In one of his name-making solo shows, An Evening with an Immigrant, he told of a childhood dominated by his three sisters. Nobody knew he was there until he was born, he joked, because he hid behind his twin in the womb. This autumn, the National Theatre will premiere his version of Chekhov’s Three Sisters, set during the Nigerian civil war. It is partly a tribute to his siblings, two of whom now run their own baking businesses: “They’re all strong, powerful women with qualities that are stereotypically, and wrongly, associated with masculinity.”
Born to a Christian mother and a Muslim father in the north of Nigeria, he became “this weird hybrid freak”, playing Barbie games with his sisters while creating his own superhero comics; breaking fast with the Muslim students at boarding school while scoffing breakfast with the Christians – “Nobody knew,” he giggles. “I got so fat.”
This sunny middle-class childhood darkened when his father, a successful import/export trader, decided to convert to Christianity. An uncle disappeared, and by the time Ellams was 12, the situation had become so perilous that his parents emigrated, moving first to London and then on to Ireland, after a fraudulent law firm, later raided and shut down by the Home Office, “lost” their papers, stalling their immigration case. In Dublin, he found himself the only black student in his school, but had the good fortune to be assigned a poetry teacher who doubled as a basketball coach – thus demonstrating that it was possible to do both, even if it was clear from the outset that Ellams would never net a three-point shot. “For the first time in Dublin I was truly a minority and the ignorance and racism stupefied me,” he says. “But Mr Nolan saw me through my confusion. He believed in me and made me want to impress him on and off the court.”
When the family eventually returned to London, he started to hang out in bookshops, devouring all the latest X-Men comics with the three poets whom he describes today as his teachers: Roger Robinson, Nii Parkes and Jacob Sam-La Rose. “We would have these long discussions, such as how the battle between Magneto and Professor X was the battle between Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. One worked with power and intimidation and the other with power and chivalry. So part of my poetry education was through comics and fandom.”
Robinson mentored Ellams through his first solo show, The 14th Tale, which won a Fringe First at the Edinburgh festival in 2009. It marked the start of a relationship with Fuel theatre, which has co-produced all his subsequent plays, and to which he is eternally grateful for taking a risk on him at a time when he had no right to work in the UK. Until 2011, when the family was eventually granted a discretionary right to remain, he eked out a living in the cash-in-hand poetry performance economy, selling his books and helping his mother to put his sisters through university after a stroke left his father unable to work. Between poetry pamphlets and performances he was also building up a reputation as a graphic designer capable of turning his hand to anything from T-shirts to tattoos.
“But everything is an offshoot of poetry,” he says. He credits the performance circuit with licensing him to cherish his sensitive side. “I wrote about things I was afraid of and performed to roomfuls of people who applauded louder the more vulnerable I was, and that experience isn’t open to many black men. But when I stepped out of the poetry community I realised people were seeing me as a black man rather than a poet, and that, in the UK, black men were thought of as animalistic; something that was owned, that was to be domesticated and dealt with.”
Back in 2017, in An Evening with an Immigrant, he drew attention to his family’s troubling immigration status, which was up for renewal later that year. But he is adamant that the title wasn’t intended as a political statement when he created the show in 2015; it was simply a way of avoiding calling it An Evening with Inua Ellams. “It didn’t really have political ramifications because Brexit hadn’t happened.” Moreover, he was strongly advised by his friend the writer Nikesh Shukla not to sign a book deal for it with any of the agents who came calling, on the grounds “that I would be pigeonholed as an immigrant for ever more”.
Though the family is settled at last in the UK, he’s more confused now than he was then. “It felt a bit like being a dog which finally catches up with a car it’s been chasing and thinks: ‘What now?’” he says. “Plus, it’s become more complicated and cantankerous and unsafe to be a person of colour with a British passport because the Tories and others in the Home Office have been making it clear to us: ‘We can take this away from you. Get that into your thick skulls.’”
In the meantime his weird hybridity continues to shape his life. “Among Nigerians I’m known as Oyimbo boy – which means foreigner – but I definitely don’t feel British enough,” he says. “London is the closest I’ve ever been to home – though home to me is probably really my laptop, Meredith.” This sets him off on a baroque explanation of how all his relationships are disastrous because of his 24/7 work ethic, and how, since his middle name is Mohammed, he decided to console himself by giving all his appliances female M-names.
Besides Maud and Meredith, there’s his iPad Mabel, with which he shares his current home in south-east London. “They’re what I call the women in my life: they give me advice and keep me connected.” Then he races off to spend an hour writing with Maud before it’s time for his next appointment.
