EVEN before lockdown, NT Live was bringing great theatre to a significantly wider audience than previously possible and now its free streamings offer more of the same, among them Inua Ellams’s Barber Shop Chronicles.

The barber’s shop, we're told, is “where men come to be men” and this play is a chance to bask in an exclusively masculine world — a novel and refreshing setting at a time when the cause of women is the more common concern.

Heart-warming, affectionate, amusing and life affirming, the characters are all African, or at least of that extraction. In a continent as huge as Africa, those lineages are as diverse and nuanced as it is possible to imagine — among them here Nigerian, Zimbabwean, Cameroonian and Ghanaian — while some are Jamaican and others embrace Britishness.