Zadie Smith in rehearsal for Wife of Willesden. Photo: Marc Brenner.
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There are many reasons to make your way to Zadie’s Smith’s play, The Wife of Willesden. Based on Geoffrey Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, it draws on 600 years of admiration for Chaucer, the undisputed father of English poetry. And bringing this play to Cambridge Massachusetts feels like a perfectly hit lob: the Loeb Theater sits in what may be the highest concentration of Chaucer scholars and “Chaucer conversant” denizens anywhere outside Great Britain. (Eavesdropping on conversations around me before and after the production, I overheard arcane Middle English puns and a steady stream of Chaucerian esoterica.) “You could make a case for ‘The Wife of Willesden’ as the world’s coolest Middle English lecture,”Andrzej Lukoski noted. “Even if you don’t feel like you’ve learned about Chaucer, you will have done.”
Beyond that academic gaggle of Chaucerian devotees, there is the perennial appeal of the lusty, concupiscent Wife of Bath. Of all of the pilgrims included in The Canterbury Tales, Alison is the one the rest of us remember and know best.
From Ron Charles in the Washington Post:
Over the centuries, the Wife of Bath has been swinging her hips through Western culture, knocking princesses off their pedestals, shocking prudes and clearing a path for savvy, witty women. With her brash physicality and subversive humor, she’s the ur-grandma of every “nasty woman,” from Shakespeare’s Mistress Overdone to James Joyce’s Molly Bloom, comedian Amy Schumer and TLC’s “MILF Manor” cougars.
“I can think of no other examples of this kind of character who has had anything like Alison’s reach, influence, and capacity for reincarnation,” writes Marion Turner. And that timelessness is reiterated in Erin Maglaque’s New York Times review of Turner’s new book, The Wife of Bath:
Chaucer’s genius in creating the Wife of Bath was to compose a character who not only subverted the stereotypes of medieval sexism, but who could — at least inwardly — speak back to male power. When Alison cries, “By God, if women hadde written stories,” we hear the pain of being excluded from the canon; of being, as she says, “beten for a book.” Turner shows with great care how literature and life come together in Chaucer’s writing: how he delicately untangles representation, expectation and experience to create an unprecedented psychological portrait of an ordinary woman.
In weaving her charismatic magic, Alison brings Chaucerians in alignment alongside those who prefer female centric narratives, especially ones as transgressive and fearless as The Wife. Her account is full of the timeless timbre of gender inequality, and the inequities she faced 600 years ago feel discouragingly au courant to a 21st century audience. Yes, yes, yes, give that woman the mic!
Meanwhile others will be drawn to this play for the simple reason that it was penned by Zadie Smith. Yes, I’m one of those passionate Zadie fans, the kind who read every book and go to every lecture. We all have our private list of sacrosanct favorites—writers, musicians, artists—whose works we ingest unquestioningly. Zadie has been on my list since she published her first novel White Teeth in 2000.
And then there are others who come to this play because they crave the pleasure of a well tuned ensemble of British actors. (I can be a sap for that too.) Or those who just love experiencing the theatrical sleight of hand that can transforms the Loeb Theater into a bustling northwest London neighborhood pub where anything could happen, including the unlikely channeling of a feisty 14th century female character through a 21st century version named Alvita (played with full bodied, lights out intensity by Claire Perkins.)
In many ways Smith backed into this project. To support her North London home borough of Brent, Smith added her name to its bid to be selected as London’s “Borough of Culture.” When Brent won, she discovered she was now expected to contribute something to the cause. According to Wendy Smith:
Months of agonizing — familiar to any writer given a free-form assignment — ensued, amusingly described in Smith’s witty introduction. She was liberated by the decision to enclose herself in a straitjacket: ‘translate a fourteenth-century medieval text written in rhyming couplets into a contemporary piece about Kilburn.’ Smith found it ‘one of the more delightful writing experiences of my life,’ and the end result is great fun to read.
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The 10-syllable verse line fits contemporary speech rhythms as naturally as it did Chaucer’s, and Smith’s relaxed approach to rhyming emulates that of her forebear. The verse isn’t stodgy or stagey, thanks to the salty vocabulary of Alvita and the pub-crawlers enlisted as a modern Greek chorus to supplement and comment on her tale. ‘The Wife of Willesden’ reminds us that poetry’s roots lie in oral storytelling, and the tradition of writing poems as dramatic narratives stretches into the 20th century.
It would be fair to say that this is, at its core, a literary project. Smith is after all a brilliant and erudite writer of fiction. But that orientation is given a theatrical boost by Indhu Rubasingham’s direction and Robert Jones’s design. The playful is energetically intermingled with this canonical tribute to an ancient text.
With endearingly modesty, Zadie the novelist embraced the advantages of a theatrical form:
The layers of experience and sensation available in the theater should be the envy of all novelists. My first glimpse of the ingenious set demonstrated the difference. In one glance I could take in, entire, what it would have taken me three pages to describe. Not to mention sound effects, music, dancing, costumes! In the end, the rhyming verse becomes mere scaffolding, over which is laid all the three-dimensional richness of sound and movement, light and shade, the human voice, the human body. And yet: I also felt the miracle of text, in the rehearsal room. That 600-year-old jokes can still land is a humbling fact indeed.
And how clever of Smith to write herself into this story, if only briefly. Her theatrical stand in serves as the bookends for the adaptation of this ancient tale. In another signatory move, Smith shifts the location of the story the Wife tells to a Jamaican setting rather than Arthurian England, a homage to her own heritage. And in a sweet moment of sly sisterhood solidarity, Smith replaces the book condemning women that Chaucer references with one by that hopelessly woman hating contemporary celebrity, Jordan Peterson. There seems to be a type of male who is permanently locked into resentment and hatred of all things female. Chaucer to Smith, it is a particular—and perennial—personality disorder.
In many ways this production is in keeping with much of the programming at American Rep over the last few years. In addition to successfully incubating productions before they land on Broadway, Diane Paulus has advocated for theater to become a more open arena, one where plays can be performed as well as the staging of other “events.” Under her leadership, old notions of what constitutes a night at the theater have been stretched and at times discarded completely. These performances have incorporated the Paulus proclivity to bring audiences closer in and to connect more intimately with what is happening on stage. Programming has featured social causes, political awareness, community building, climate change.
For all of its erudite underpinnings, The Wife of Willesden is part of that tradition. It can, inter alia, be viewed as a love letter to the value of community and connection. The pub setting of the play—where a gathering of disparate people can tell each other their stories—is a worthy metaphor for what the collective experience of theater can be.