Reviewed by
Kevin J. Harty
La Salle University
Chaucer’s Wife of Bath has had more afterlives than she had husbands at the church door and company kept in her youth combined. Betsy Bowden’s 2017 The Wife of Bath in Afterlife: Ballads to Blake, remains a definitive study, and Marion Turner has just published a “biography” of Chaucer’s most (in)famous Canterbury pilgrim, The Wife of Bath: A Biography (2022). Zadie Smith’s 2020 stage adaptation of the Wife’s prologue and tale, The Wife of Willesden, finds a home in twenty-first century Willesden, a London municipal borough with a large Jamaican-British population, who proudly speak the Queen’s (now King’s) English with a clear unadulterated North Wezzian accent. A pub crawl lands a company of close to nine and twenty stage characters in the Colin Campbell on the Kilburn High Road as Polly Publican declares a lockdown, during which, at Polly’s urging, sundry folks start to tell their stories in hopes of winning a full English breakfast with chips.
The story telling contest starts off as a bit of a bust. Several men step forward and mansplain their tales to the women in the audience, or cockblock them from telling their own stories. Even worse, dewy-eyed lovers, sensing a possible Hallmark moment, detail how their relationships were always meant to be. Enter stage right, a full glass of Baileys in hand, Alvita (played by the truly astonishing Clare Perkins), a Jamaican-born British woman in her fifties, who knows a thing or two about the battle of the sexes and has more than a few scars to prove it—and who admits to being ten years younger than she really is. Unapologetic about everything in her life—her need for good sex, her clothing, her lifestyle, her motor, her speech, her general attitude, and her opinions about everything—she takes over the pub, and the story-telling competition, like an unstoppable force of nature. Alvita sets her sights on those who suggest double standards for what men and women can and can’t do, and on those who weaponize religion to the detriment of those, especially women, who don’t share their narrow-minded beliefs.
Chaucer’s Wife had to counter the dicta of clerkish authorities. Alvita butts heads with her own Bible-toting Aunty P, who cites chapter and verse to disapprove not only of her niece’s five marriages, but also of any sexual activity, whether within or outside of marriage. Chaucer’s Wife cited King Solomon’s harem to counter those who condemned multiple marriages. Alvita, refusing to be slut-shamed, looks to the sexual escapades of the much-revered Bob Marley and Stevie Wonder—"Now, you know Stevie’s had more than one wife!/Blindness don’t stop him enjoying his life”—as justification for having had (only) five husbands (so far!).
Chaucer’s Wife’s lengthy prologue is twice interrupted, first by the gender ambiguous Pardoner seeking marital advice, and then by the quarrelsome Summoner and Friar whose professional animosity spills over to the personal. All three have their counterparts in Smith’s play. The Pardoner becomes a charity chugger named Colin who’s afraid that his bride-to-be, Sophie, will own him if he follows Alvita’s advice—he even allows that such advice is a form of reverse sexism. The Summoner and Friar become a local bailiff named Bartosz with a thick Eastern European accent and Aunty P’s spiritual advisor, Pastor Jegede, a megachurch prosperity preacher, with all the vices of his ilk, and none of the virtues of a true man of the cloth.
Alvita’s prologue introduces us to her five husbands: Ian, an older white man; Darren, a young good looking bwoy; Winston, a Rastaman; Eldridge a wealthy gentleman in his fifties of Caribbean heritage; and Ryan, a Scottish student in his twenties doing his masters. We also meet Alvita’s supporters, her extremely shy niece Kelly, and her bestie, Zaire, who only wishes her life could be as rich as Alvita’s. Rounding out the cast of characters are several minor characters who appear in brief cameos to support or condemn Alvita, including God and Black Jesus (no less), along with St. Paul, Nelson Mandela, Socrates, and Arrius and Eriphyle (the last two by way of Ovid).
The ups and downs of Alvita’s five marriages are familiar enough to those who have read Chaucer—the best husbands are old and rich; the worst, young and poor. But Alvita, like Chaucer’s Alyson, fails to follow her own advice, when she settles for a penurious graduate student with extremely nice legs (all three of them!) for husband number five. Ryan, like his medieval counterpart, is a misogynist who is fond of reading printed and online anti-feminist diatribes to Alvita: “Happy wife, happy life. Nothing ever rhymes with/ Happy Husband, ever wonder why?/Welcome to married life, dumbass!” And, when she tears a page from his book, he cuffs her on the side of her head causing her to lose her hearing in one ear. Their stormy relationship finally settles down when Ryan, fearful that he may have killed Alvita in a scuffle, admits “What’s best for you is clearly best for me.”
Alvita’s tale transfers the vicious rape in Chaucer from King Arthur’s court in Camelot to that of Queen Nanny in Maroon Town, Jamaica, where the rapist is not a knight but a young maroon. One of the island’s national heroes, Nanny led a revolt by former slaves against the British in eighteenth-century Jamaica. The protracted guerilla war pitted Westward maroons against the British, who were incapable of countering the hit-and-run tactics of their opponents. A resulting peace treaty ended slavery on the island and granted Nanny and her followers land on which to build a settlement of their own. Nanny’s importance in Jamaican history and culture is still evident today: her image appears on the country’s $500 bill.
Again, as in Chaucer, nothing precipitates the rape. The maroon just assumes that the young girl is his for the taking, and he is sentenced to death, until Nanny intervenes and demands restorative justice. The maroon is then sent out to learn what it is that women desire most, and given a year to find the answer, or face execution for his crime. His search provides him with an endless series of contradictory statements until he happens upon a truly loathly ancient Obeah woman who promises to provide him with the answer that he needs to save his life, provided that he will do whatever she subsequently asks of him. Once he tells Nanny and her court what he has learned from the old woman (the thing “women want is basically this:/They want their husbands to consent, freely;/To submit to their wives’ wills.”), the young maroon is freed from his death sentence, only to have his loathly savior step forward and demand that he marry her. Shocked and more than a little disgusted, the maroon offers the woman “all my creps, my diamond rings,/But please leave my body! It’s my body.” More kind to him than he deserves, the old woman offers him a choice: she can be loathly and faithful, or fair and run around on him. He finally agrees to let her make the choice for him, but instead, as in Chaucer, of her transforming herself into a beautiful young maiden, the loathly lady is transformed into Alvita who brings the play to an almost end.
Alvita’s prologue and tale are framed by appearances of a character identified as the Author. She initially sets up some background for what is to follow in both Alvita’s prologue and tale. She then helps us walk away from what we have just seen by offering a retraction not only of anything that we may have been offended by on stage during the last ninety or so minutes, but also of anything in her previous works that readers may have found offensive. Fans of those previous works—this is Smith’s first play—will recognize the references to critics and readers who have called the author out for her language, for her cultural appropriations, for her scenes with dodgy sex, for her heresy, and for her general existential bleakness.
This production is in many ways better than the text of the play—and cuts at least one scene from the script involving Alvita’s niece and an unfortunate sexual encounter that she has had. Clare Perkins is, as I indicated earlier, a wonder, holding forth as she does on stage nonstop for the run of the show. The set by Robert Jones and Ben Davies is a knockout—would that any London pub were as well stocked as the Colin Campbell, with its shelves of liquor bottles richly backlit thanks to Guy Hoare’s lighting design. All the members of the technical team and the actors deserve kudos, but the play, especially when performed, raises some issues about Chaucer’s text that we always knew were there, but not nearly as blatantly so, until we see them acted out on the stage.
The Wife of Bath’s prologue is indeed too long and too shrill. Her tit for tat with the purveyors of authority who would put women down ultimately works in some ways against her. The key moment of her tale, the random rape of an unsuspecting maiden, is brutal, but even more disturbing is the fact that the maiden simply disappears from Chaucer’s text. We never learn what happens to her. Her rapist is granted an undeserved happy ending by a woman transformed from old and ugly to young and fair. He is thus rewarded for his original violent misdeed and for his selfish whining response to the fact that he must keep his word and marry the loathly lady who had saved his life. Such a transformation is, of course, impossible for the Wife of Bath who tells the tale. Her days of happily ever after are numbered. Nanny’s demand that the maiden be granted restorative justice raises possible alternatives to the treatment of the rape victim in Chaucer, but we never see that restorative justice at work in the production. The printed script suggests that such justice may have helped Alvita’s niece Kelly. And the whiny maroon talking about how his life will be ruined if he must marry the loathly lady (But please leave my body! It’s my body.”) is especially hard to take, given the fact that he has, a year before, ruined the life of an innocent Jamaican woman. The Wife of Willesden offers a great deal to modern audiences in arguing that Alyson’s and Alvita’s lots are not all that different. Time has not really changed attitudes toward women as much as we might think, but many of us might have hoped that the play offered even more than it does. Chaucer’s Alyson continues both to intrigue and to frustrate—one only wishes that Smith would have done a better job of choosing a side in the debate about how ultimately we are to view medieval Bath’s most (in)famous wife.
The Wife of Willesden, adapted by Zadie Smith from Chaucer’s Wife of Bath. Review of the first preview production on 25 February 2023 at the American Repertory Theater, Loeb Drama Center, in Cambridge, MA. Directed by Indhu Rubasingham, with Marcus Adolphy, Sophie Cartman, George Eggay, Andrew Frame, Troy Glasgow, Claudia Grant, Nikita Johal, Scott Miller, Jessica Murrain, Ellen Thomas, and Clare Perkins. Running time 1:30.
Zadie Smith, The Wife of Willesden. Penguin Books, 2021.
