A streetwise twist on Chaucer is boozy, lewd and bursting with brio
Theatre The Wife of Willesden Kiln Theatre, Kilburn
★★★★★
WPerkins has the room eating out of her hand, heedless of whether we choke
hether or not you’re an existing fan of Zadie Smith, her rambunctious theatrical debut, reinventing Chaucer for a contemporary audience, is going to be right up your street.
Who’d have thought that the crucial pre-festive kick to get the post-pandemic party started would lie in the rebooting of a 600-year-old text, The Wife of Bath’s Tale?
Smith’s award-winning debut novel White Teeth included the figure of Clara Bowden, described as wearing her “sexuality with an older woman’s ease”. In the case of Jamaican-born Alvita, as Smith has renamed Chaucer’s outspoken, lusty widow Alyson, the sexuality is rip-roaring, of a piece with a neighbourhood – the borough of
Brent – that Smith is besotted with, full of noise, life and working-class character.
Delivering a setting fit for a gutsy heroine, the Kiln has been radically made-over, the auditorium transformed into a cosy Kilburn High Road pub; multiple lamp-shades hang overhead, punters snuggle at tables and bottle-crammed bar units form the main décor. The centrepiece: an old-fashioned curtained-off stage.
A striking lookalike of the author (played by Crystal Condie, complete with large earrings and headwrap) delivers a short spiel, recalling a Canterbury Tales-esque scenario: a 2019 lock-in during which the drinkers took it in turns to tell stories, the prize being a full English breakfast.
The stand-out turn elbows her way into view: Clare Perkins’ liqueurswigging lady in red, squiffily eyeing the room with disdain. “I been married five damn times since I was 19,” is her opening gambit, and from then on she has the room eating out of her hand, heedless of whether anyone chokes on the contents, which are as ribald and emancipated as can be.
The delight of the night – which leaves you begging for more at some 100 minutes – is the way Smith has honoured the source in terms of its poetic verve, answering Chaucer’s couplets with ingenious rhymes of her own, and established a continuum of female experience and feminist expression. We may be centuries on from socially instilled wifely submission – with God the father as the presiding patriarch – but Alvita’s contempt-meets-craving for the opposite sex, and resolve to get what she wants, in the bedroom and out, carries the original’s sense of battling the status quo.
Smith reminds us that reproving religious propriety endures, via a pop-up Nigerian minister and churchgoing aunt – and emphasises that her latterday Alyson, on the prowl for hubby number six, can quote scripture, too. The evening, tartly directed by Indhu Rubasingham, locates the shock-factor in the Chaucer, daring us to watch as Perkins’ force of nature revisits her husbands in turn, and, cripes, cunnilingus and male masturbation are simulated. Heavens, there’s even a turn by a “black Jesus”, a brandished tray achieving a halo effect, who mocks the older men’s lack of virility. Though it’s more diatribe than drama, the chaps do get mutinous words in edgeways.
As with the original, the wife’s eventual “tale”, which relocates an Arthurian quest enforced on a rapist to find out what women “want” to 18th-century Jamaica – feels anticlimactic after the prologue. But few of those exiting to the carnivalesque disco of Stevie Wonder’s Sir Duke will feel short-changed. Smith has said she will now return to novel writing; on the evidence of this, our theatre would be mad to let her get away.