The Wife of Willesden, the first play crafted by celebrated British writer Zadie Smith, is an astonishingly clever and entertaining rendition of "The Wife of Bath's Tale," one of the most popular stories in The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer's medieval masterpiece. Mirroring the original with a prologue and the tale set in rhyming couplets from lines of 10 syllables each, The Wife of Willesden concludes in true Chaucerian style with a "retraction," a tongue-in-cheek "apologia" by the author, who is clearly having a rollicking good time, for any offense her work has caused.
The prologue, set in a noisy North London pub in 2020, introduces brash and cheeky Alvita, a free-spirited, middle-aged woman with Jamaican roots who lives in nearby Willesden and is on her fifth husband. Smith (Grand Union; Feel Free; Swing Time) refers to Alvita and Alyson, Chaucer's boisterous heroine in "The Wife of Bath's Tale," as "half-sisters." Both women share a refreshing indifference to the opinions of others and a cheery, carefree attitude toward life that is contagious, their confident sensuality on glorious display. Smith's text, spiked with raucous and often erotic satire, is almost a direct transposition of "The Wife of Bath's Tale," with an updated cast featuring Nelson Mandela, Black Jesus, Alvita's pious aunt, the minister of a local megachurch and all five of Alvita's hapless husbands.
"The Wife of Bath's Tale," originally commentary on 14th-century sexual politics, is surprisingly relevant today. And Alvita is perfectly positioned, just like Alyson in her day, to galvanize those who could use a little more wildness in their lives. --Shahina Piyarali, reviewer