Marcus Adolphy, Clare Perkins, George Eggay, and Andrew Frame in The Wife of Willesden. Photo: © Stephanie Berger

The Colin Campbell is the kind of pub I wish (still) existed somewhere near BAM, in my neighborhood—a welcoming space in northwest London, brought to life in Robert Jones’s set and Guy Hoare’s lighting with rich colors and gleaming bottles and warmly glowing lamps; occupied by a friendly mix of neighborhood folks of all races and ages and classes and genders (including a chunk of the audience who are seated onstage), presided over by an owner who keeps mayhem in check with a firm hand but also gives the people what they want. The Wife of Willesden, novelist Zadie Smith’s retelling of one of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, “The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” is set in this bar, and the piece is deeply rooted in place: Conceived as part of a celebration of the borough of Brent being the 2020 London Borough of Culture. Featuring local lingo so specific that the program has a multi-page glossary (which may be a bit of overkill). Steeped in the micro-culture of both the neighborhood and London’s Caribbean immigrant populations (the play is dedicated to the Windrush generation). In the prologue to the published edition, Smith writes, “Alyson’s voice–brash, honest, cheeky, salacious, outrageous, unapologetic–is one I’ve heard and loved all my life: in the flats, at school, in the playground of my childhood and then the pubs of my maturity, at bus stops, in shops, and of course up and down the Kilburn High Road.” 

Chaucer’s Alyson here becomes Alvita (Clare Perkins), a fifty-five-year-old Jamaican-born woman–a snappy dresser, a master storyteller, well-traveled, lusty, and five times married. Alvita is brash, bold, even overbearing, bawdy, sometimes mean, and utterly unashamed by her desires, both sexual and emotional. Perkins has a grand time holding court, and she makes it clear that Alvita is going to be the center of attention, particularly male attention, in any room she walks into.   

You might think this all sounds very modern, but the most striking thing about The Wife of Willesden is how very, very closely it hews to Chaucer–the language and the cultural referents are modern, yes, and when Alvita finally gets around to telling “The Wife of Willesden’s Tale,” Smith has replaced an Arthurian legend with a Jamaican one. But time and time again, when I questioned a characterization or a storytelling beat, I looked twice and realized it went straight back to Chaucer. (Smith does add an amusing but possibly unnecessary further framing device that places an “Author” [Jessica Murrain playing a pretty close analogue of Smith herself] as the witness of Alvita’s storytelling.)

Smith’s touch with rhyming, metered verse is deft. You have to really be listening to even catch most of the rhymes; the verse gives rhythm and structure but it doesn’t hammer itself home. One of her strengths as a novelist is the quickness with which she sketches characters, and she does clever work with the peripheral figures here–Alvita’s husbands; her best friend; her aunt; the preacher–all limned with a few quick lines. And director Indhu Rubasingham’s work with a verse-speaking ensemble is exceptional. The language comes off as effortlessly natural and character-driven, even when everyone is speaking in the same meter.  (The entire ensemble is strong, but I was particularly impressed by Scott Miller as the youngest and nastiest of the five husbands, George Eggay as a pastor with a maniacal gleam in his eye, and Ellen Thomas as Alvita’s pious aunt.)

The faithfulness of the adaptation means the oddity of the structure, too, goes back to Chaucer: the titular tale told by Alvita doesn’t actually come into the piece until ⅔ of the way through it. The bulk of the narrative rests in the prologue–Alvita philosophizing about marriage in general, about her five marriages, to good men and bad; about her love of sex and her need for emotional and financial autonomy; about her quibbles with religious authorities who’d like to opine on the morality of her conduct. Alvita is a force of nature, but sometimes all you can do with forces of nature is get trailed along in their wake. There’s not a lot of narrative momentum, in other words.  The piece can feel more admirable for the sharpness of skill with which Smith has approached the project than satisfying in the room. 

One of the problems is, I think, the room I saw it in. The Kiln Theater in London, which originated the project, describes itself as “a welcoming and proudly local venue.” And The Wife of Willesden is a proudly local piece–I definitely felt like I was missing cues about relationships and class from details like accents and costumes and referents that went over the head of the American audience. The BAM Harvey is not the space for intimacy, for feeling like the audience is in community with the action; I’m betting the people sitting at the onstage tables and benches had a very different experience than I did. But I also want to see the show that has this kind of rich engagement with the local culture of Fort Greene, Brooklyn, rather than transplanting one from Willesden, London.