‘The Wife of Willesden’ – Adapted by Zadie Smith from Chaucer’s ‘The Wife of Bath’ from The Canterbury Tales; Directed by Kiln Theatre Artistic Director Indhu Rubasingham; Design by Robert Jones, Lighting Design by Guy Hoare; Composition and Sound Design by Drama Desk Ben and Max Ringham. The Wife of Willesden is a Kiln Theatre Production and is presented in association with BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) at the Loeb Drama Center, 64 Brattle St., Cambridge, MA through March 17
by Mike Hoban
What do women want?
Clearly, it depends on whom you ask (please shut up, men), but if you ask Alvita, the central character in The Wife of Willesden, the British import production now playing a limited engagement at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, a heaping helping of sex is a good start. As she rhetorically tells her five husbands as she spins her tale, “I demand pleasure. That is your debt to me…You’ll agree to owe me love, and good sex, and that when we marry, your body and soul will be mine as long as we’re a thing. From that time till we’re done, your body is my playground, (and) it’s for me, not for you.”
The Wife of Willesden is a modern retelling of “The Wife of Bath” from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, set in 21st-century northwest London. It’s the debut play from bestselling author Zadie Smith (Swing Time, White Teeth) that premiered in 2021 at the Kiln Theatre in London. Set in the Colin Campbell, a small English pub that resembles the finest of Irish pubs in Boston (except with a far more diverse and heavily Caribbean clientele), the play is essentially a one-woman show with sidekicks, as Alvita (the vivacious Clare Perkins) commands the stage with righteous authority, unflinching opinions and a fire hose blast of comically charged insights into love, sex, and marriage.
As the show opens, it’s a night of merriment at the Colin, when pub operator Polly Bailey proposes a story-telling contest for the patrons, a kind of boozy version of the Moth. It sounds like great fun, as the play’s author (herself a fourth wall character in the show) imparts, “If there’s a person in Brent who doesn’t think their own life story isn’t just the thing to turn into a four-hundred-page book, I’d like to meet them.”
The first few pub denizens are fairly uninspiring but brief, then Alvita takes the mic and seizes control of the show. She delivers her bawdy treatise on sex and marriage while taking well-deserved shots at organized religion, or more specifically, its adherents. Much of it is funny, and some of it contains genuine pearls of wisdom, particularly when it comes to the double standard applied to women when it comes to sexual behavior.
The best bits on religion come when she spars with her Jamaican, bible-thumping Auntie P. (a hilarious Ellen Thomas) and the Nigerian Pastor Jegede (George Eggay), where she points out the hypocrisy in the Good Book, with help from both God and Black Jesus. Her thoughts on marriage and sex are aided greatly by having her five assembled husbands in the pub to parry with, three older gents and a pair of younger, somewhat abusive lads. There’s also her chorus of supporting women, cheering on every righteous statement from their hero (“She’s not just fierce though,” gushes her 20-something niece. “She’s sweet and wise. Cupid’s dart has pierced her so often, she’s an expert on love!”
Unfortunately, the routine becomes a little repetitive after a while, even with a high-energy talent like Perkins doing her best to keep it fresh. Even the sexual remarks lose their edge after a dozen or so references to her vagina, complete with Perkins’ wild hand gestures repeatedly pointing up her flaming red skirt, as if we had forgotten where it was located.
The language in the play is steeped in pub culture and heavy on British and Jamaican slang that may not be easily understood by American audiences. The accents can be a little challenging at times as well, as the audience has to re-adjust its ears to understand the dialogue that jumps from cultured British to cockney to lyrical Jamaican and Nigerian inflections on the English language. It reminded me of Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars at the A.R.T. in 2016 – where the accents of the actors from various counties in Ireland created the same issues.
There’s also a second tale that Alvita spins (the first is actually a prologue) that tells the story from 1700s Jamaica, where a young man must find out ‘What women want’ or face death at the hands of rebel hero Queen Nanny of the Maroons. It’s a fairly compelling folk tale and delivers some of the best moments of the evening.
Overall, The Wife of Willesden is a fairly entertaining piece, and Perkins’ performance alone (plus the incredible pub set) may be worth the price of admission.
So what DO women want?
You’ll have to visit the A.R.T. to find out. For tickets and information, go to: https://americanrepertorytheater.org/
