Theatre review: The Wife of Willesden - The Jewish Chronicle

This terrific Canterbury Tales-inspired show came about through sheer good luck. When Brent was crowned London’s Borough of Culture for 2020 one of the area’s most celebrated living writers Zadie Smith was approached to write something for the Kilburn theatre, a venue just around the corner from where she was raised. It felt right not least because Smith used to attend drama classes there when she was a child.

Early intentions were for a monologue. But the plan morphed into a multi-character play after Twitter over-interpreted the announcement that something written by the celebrated novelist was to appear at the theatre.

So in part this play is an attempt to meet those expectations. The thrilling result centres on Alvita, a 50-something Jamaican-born British woman who hails from Willesden and whose life story is defined not by her five husbands but by the right she asserts to have sex with them as frequently as her libido demands. Though only, it should be added for as long as the marriages last.

Like Smith’s novels NW and White Teeth the setting is north west London, specifically a lock-in at Kilburn High Road’s Colin Campbell pub.

“We had all types,” says the author of the night in 2019 when locals were celebrating the borough’s new found cultural status. There were “people from church, temple, mosque, shul…” all of whom are invited by the landlady to regale each other with their life stories. The best will win breakfast with chips.

Rob Jones’s design turns the Kiln’s auditorium into a pub with a well stocked bar that encircles much of the stage. The evening starts in earnest with the arrival of Alvita, played by Clare Perkins in a figure-hugging dress of Saturday night red.

She is inspired, Smith reveals in the forward to her play, by Alyson - AKA The Wife of Bath in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. Alyson too has been married five times. She also subverts medieval attitudes towards women and sex, which holds that ideally they shouldn’t have any.

In Chaucer’s original these 14th century opinions are embodied by the Friar and Summoner (whose job was to bring people before the ecclesiastical court to account for their spiritual crimes). In Smith’s version they become a chugger mugger and a local evangelical pastor (George Eggay) who oppose Alvita’s right to have her libido satisfied on her terms and not theirs, which in the pastor’s case Alvita argues has been drawn from a misinterpretation of the bible.

“It’s true Paul said, He didn’t want us having sex for fun, But it weren’t like, Commandment number one,” says Alvita, in couplets that mirror Chaucer’s yet feel hewn from the streets of Willesden. “What you call laws, I call advice,” she adds with Talmudic reason.

Perkins is mesmerising in the role. Clever, savvy and sexual, she delivers her arguments with the reason of a QC and the zeal of a revolutionary firebrand. A one woman force of nature she shrivels the idea that men are the dominant sexual force.

She might have been forged as a #MeToo creation. But she lives in more than one moment and if there is any justice will be stalking the stages for centuries to come.

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Theatre