'Jaja's African Hair Braiding' review — this exuberant play explores heritage, identity and sisterhood

Read our review of Jocelyn Bioh's Jaja's African Hair Braiding, now in performances at the Lyric Hammersmith to 25 April.

Summary

• Jaja's African Hair Braiding has its UK premiere at the Lyric Hammersmith
• Jocelyn Bioh's play is set in a Harlem hair braiding salon
• The strong cast includes Sewa Zamba and Zainab Jah
• Monique Touko's production is an exuberant celebration of sisterhood

Workplace plays don’t come more buoyant and bursting with heart than Jaja’s African Hair Braiding, which was nominated for five Tony Awards in 2024 and has arrived at the same west London venue that hosted author Jocelyn Bioh’s School Girls; or, the African Mean Girls Play almost three years ago. The director here, as then, is Monique Touko, though this production feels like more of a happening than the earlier one.

And whereas that play - itself bound for Broadway in the autumn - addresses issues of heritage, identity and the like within a Ghanaian boarding school in 1986, Jaja examines similar themes, and more, within the context of a Harlem hair braiding salon across 12 hours on a sweltering summer’s day in 2019.

Eighteen-year-old Marie (Sewa Zamba, making her professional stage debut) is the aspirational daughter of salon owner Jaja (New York stage regular Zainab Jah): her mother arrives fashionably late to glamorous effect in time for a finish that shifts the play’s tone into an entirely different gear.

In the meantime, the 90-minute comedy-drama (no interval) introduces us to those who do the braiding, their rates determined in private conversations with customers that happen outside the salon, and to the women who come calling – one of whom is so reprehensible that you have to wonder why she isn’t sent packing after her first of many aspersions.

A sort of distaff Barber Shop Chronicles, Jaja uses the world of micro-braiding and cornrows as a prism through which are refracted the women’s stories of domestic disarray and geographical displacement; competitiveness shows its ugly face alongside deep, abiding camaraderie.

The four-time married Bea (a feisty Dolapo Oni) doesn’t take kindly to the desertion of a client for a newer colleague, Ndidi (Bola Akeju), but Bea is nonetheless there for Marie when it really matters. Beneath her fury exists real fortitude. Miriam (a sweet-faced Jadesola Odunjo) recognises the opportunity afforded her in the US but misses her family back home in Sierra Leone.

The play addresses one-upmanship between women – Marie at one point is especially peremptorily put in her place – and their often-prickly relations with men who, in this play anyway, are least trustworthy when at their most charming. A vocal press night audience was responsive to every shift and swerve on the courtship spectrum, and Demmy Ladipo navigates all four male roles with astonishing ease. The socks and jewellery on offer are more reliable, one imagines, than the affections of men for whom talk is cheap, even when they come bearing flowers.

Those new to the specifics of this world, the equipment needed for the job beautifully detailed in Paul Wills’s atmospheric set, will want to be alert to accents that can be difficult at the start, though Touko’s production is itself so hyper-exuberant that you soon discern the lay of the land.

I’m less sure about the direction the play takes near an ending that feels as if it may have been tweaked to accommodate the grievous times in which we – and immigrant communities in general – live. While one absolutely recognises the dangerous landscape on offer beyond the shop’s front doors, one wishes this threat figured more boldly within the play earlier on: as it is, the play’s conclusion arrives by authorial fiat, which is especially noticeable within a play that otherwise springs completely organically to life.

Still, there’s giddy pleasure to be had from Beyoncé-style braids that here are tossed this way and that like a follicular whip, not to mention the celebration of sisterhood that allows for tenderness even when the women are tired – hands, in one instance, bleeding from the demands of the job. Our world at large may be unravelling, but this play’s intricate weave, for the most part, is just right.

Jaja's African Hair Braiding is at the Lyric Hammersmith to 25 April. Book Jaja's African Hair Braiding tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk

Photo credit: Jaja's African Hair Braiding (Photos by Manuel Harlan)