The Wife of Willesden by Zadie Smith (review)

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Reviewed by:

• The Wife of Willesden by Zadie Smith
• Carla Neuss

THE WIFE OF WILLESDEN. By Zadie Smith. Directed by Indhu Rubasingham. Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York. April 16, 2023.

Zadie Smith’s The Wife of Willesden, which premiered in November 2021 at London’s Kiln Theatre, transposes Chaucer’s (in)famous Wife of Bath from The Canterbury Tales to the present-day, multicultural suburb of London named in the title. For those needing a refresher on fourteenth-century literature, Chaucer’s magnum opus is comprised of twenty-four stories told by medieval English travelers to pass the time while on a pilgrimage to Canterbury Cathedral. The stories range from biography to sermons, farce to fantasy, but the Wife of Bath’s tale has had particular staying power due to her proto-feminist narrative of sexual fulfillment and female autonomy.

In Smith’s reimagining of Chaucer’s original, the Canterbury road is relocated to a pub in contemporary Willesden that is holding an open-mic storytelling night. Using this conceit, Smith reincarnates Alyson, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, as Alvita, a British Jamaican woman in her fifties who, like Alyson, has been married five times and is more than happy to recount the story of her misadventures in love and matrimony. In addition to her titillating autobiography, Alvita, like Alyson, offers her audience a tale that promises to divulge what women really want. Smith’s theatrical adaptation is loyal to the narrative structure of Chaucer’s text; the play devotes sixty minutes of its one-hundred-minute run time to Alvita’s account of her life and lovers. The final thirty minutes feature the story of a rapacious knight who must ascertain the true desire of women or else forfeit his life, but transposed to a mythic colonial Jamaica instead of the idylls of medieval England.

Smith maintains some key aspects of Chaucer’s original: her dialogue features a rhyme scheme that echoes Chaucer’s poetic meter; her Alvita, played virtuosically by Clare Perkins, is as arresting and entertaining as Chaucer’s Alyson; and her use of [End Page 99] contemporary slang cannily captures the cheek and wit of Chaucer’s pantheon of personalities. In other ways, though, The Wife of Willesden faltered in attempting to transpose its literary source material to the dialogic medium of the stage. Smith’s Alvita was backed up by an ensemble of nine other players who enacted her story as she narrativized it; however, the production at times seemed to reduce the ensemble to dioramic puppets, whose actions merely served as visual aids against which Alvita’s monologue played. In this way, it struck me that the Wife of Bath’s tale would perhaps be in better company not with ensemble-based performance but with the solo-performer show; the raconteurship that characterizes Chaucer’s original has more in common, both stylistically and substantively, with Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s stage version of Fleabag than Arabian Nights. Additionally, as theatre critics observed in the press, Alyson/Alvita’s sexual liberation is less revolutionary to a contemporary audience than it was in the Middle Ages. I was particularly disappointed that Alvita, unlike her medieval precedent, seemingly has no career other than serially marrying; Chaucer’s fourteenth-century heroine was an accomplished clothmaker and businesswoman. In this way, it is perhaps Alyson, not Alvita, who is truly the more progressive figu e, despite Smith’s best efforts

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Clare Perkins (Alvita) and three of her five husbands: Marcus Adolphy (Winston), George Eggay (Eldridge), and Andrew Frame (Ian) in The Wife of Willesden. (Photo: Stephanie Berger.)

For historians and scholars of literature, Smith’s adaptation resonates with recent efforts to decolonize and diversify the field of medieval studies. While the Wife of Willesden strove to demonstrate the uncanny contemporaneity of many of Chaucer’s themes, the deployment of race was underdeveloped. Alvita’s language is peppered with British Jamaican slang and euphemisms, to the extent that the entire program provided by BAM was devoted to a glossary of the “North Wheezian” dialect of its protagonist. However, this use of language seemed to perform a racialized subculture without necessarily directly engaging in...