LUSTY ALVITA’S A TIMELESS HEROINE
LITERARY titan Zadie Smith was born and bred in Brent, which is how she ended up writing her debut play for the Kiln Theatre, where she had drama classes as a child.
Her plot follows the multiple marriages of British-Jamaican Alvita, played by former EastEnder Clare Perkins as a force of nature in a red dress. Alvita’s five husbands are the millstones of her life. Whether older men or young bucks, each were made to satisfy her uninhibited libido.
It is a story she tells during a lock-in at Kilburn High Road’s Sir Colin Campbell pub, recreated here by designer Robert Jones so that a great arcing bar embraces the auditorium like a boozy cuddle.
So, like much of Smith’s prose, including the novels NW and White Teeth, the setting here is north-west London.
Yet Smith’s inspiration is Chaucer’s 14th-century The
Canterbury Tales – or more specifically Alyson, The Wife of Bath who was married five times and subverted religious and medieval attitudes towards women by asserting her right to enjoy sex. Some things haven’t changed. Alyson is now the streetwise and learned Alvita who out-argues anyone, including local pious pastor (George Eggay) and her priggish aunt (Ellen Thomas). If they quote the Bible at her she bats it back with interest and in brilliant rhyming couplets: ‘It’s true Paul said, He didn’t want us having sex for fun, But it weren’t like, Commandment number one.’ Smith honours the structure of Chaucer’s original with such ease that this scandalously fun and salacious show is never the po-faced tribute to classical literature that it might have been in less capable hands. The poetry is a delight yet transcends the form and makes for great dialogue. Indhu Rubasingham’s production, meanwhile, is as commanding as it is playful. And although Alvita is perfect for the #MeToo era she is actually more permanent than that – a new theatrical heroine for all time.