Ellen Thomas is a mysterious old woman of 18th-century Jamaica in Zadie Smith’s comedy The Wife of Willesden. Behind Thomas are ensemble members Scott Miller and George Eggay.
The Wife of Willesden, novelist Zadie Smith’s captivating playwriting debut, is a contemporary version of The Wife of Bath’s prologue and tale from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. As many an English major will attest, Alyson, the Wife of Bath, is the most colorful of the pilgrims whose verse monologues form the bulk of Chaucer’s 14th-century masterpiece. Using rhymed couplets with 10 syllables per line (as did Chaucer), Smith has transformed Alyson to Alvita, a Jamaica-born Londoner of today, in a comedy faithful to its source material yet discerning about contemporary social issues.
In The Wife of Willesden, Troy Glasgow plays a warrior sentenced to death for rape who’s seeking the answer to a riddle that would save his life. Ellen Thomas is the old woman willing to help him, but only at a steep price.
Alvita (Clare Perkins), in a tight, low-cut red dress and spiked heels, is the most eye-catching and voluble customer in the Colin Campbell, a Northwest London pub. She’s here for a storytelling competition, hoping to win “a full English breakfast … on the house. With chips.”
Scenic designer Robert Jones has plopped the gaudy Colin Campbell onto the stage of BAM’s Harvey Theater. Director Indhu Rubasingham (artistic director of London’s Kiln Theatre, where this production began) makes the proceedings immersive by situating a number of spectators on the set, encouraging them to dance and mingle before showtime and get mildly rambunctious during the performance. That arrangement, combined with the thumpy 1970s and ’80s playlist devised by sound designers Ben and Max Ringham, keeps things festive from first to last.
Alvita (Clare Perkins), the Wife of Willesden, boogies down with her bestie Zaire (Jessica Murrain) in Zadie Smith’s new comedy, imported from the Kiln Theatre in London. Photographs by Stephanie Berger.
Before launching into her tall tale, Alvita introduces herself. Brandishing a glass of her favorite tipple (Bailey’s Irish Cream), she joyfully and profanely recounts how she mastered five husbands (outliving four thus far). Her recollections spring to three-dimensional life as husbands—Ian (Andrew Frame), Darren (Troy Glasgow), Winston (Marcus Adolphy), Eldredge (George Eggay), and Ryan (Scott Miller)—materialize from the crowd around her.
Alvita’s strategy of marrying older, weaker-willed men has paid off in bequests from the first four. As to the fifth, who’s still living, she claims he was a love match (though her account suggests sheer lust instead). Ryan, she tells us, was a hunky Oxford graduate student when she met him. “Nice body, tight round bum … / He was twenty. I could have been his mum.”
When Ryan wouldn’t bend to Alvita’s will, the relationship deteriorated from bickering to domestic violence. In the inevitable showdown, Alvita says, she “clocked him proper / hard on his cheek.” Both sustained injuries, but she ostensibly was the victor: “ … after we’d talked it through / A long time, we did manage to agree … / That everything would be decided by me: / The flat stayed in my name, and the motor, / Boy can’t move without checking my rota. / And now that I control tings completely / You’ll hear him say: / Oh, my amazing wife, Do whatever you want with your own life; / What’s best for you is clearly best for me.”
If things are going swimmingly with Ryan, why is Alvita roistering on her own in a pub, apparently trawling for Husband No. 6? As played by the ebullient Perkins, Alvita is not only controlling but also fiercely proud, loath to acknowledge having met her match in Ryan. She’s counting on charm and Scheherazade-level skills at storytelling to conceal what an untrustworthy narrator she is.
Like all but one of the 11 actors in The Wife of Willesden, Jessica Murrain plays multiple roles. Here she’s Queen Nanny, a Jamaican monarch offering a reprieve to a warrior sentenced to death.
Having spoken of the husbands, her views on female sexual gratification, and sundry other matters, Alvita finally begins her yarn for the contest. Like Chaucer’s original, this story concerns a young warrior (Glasgow) sentenced to death for rape but offered a chance of reprieve. Smith has moved the action from Arthurian England to 18th-century Jamaica, where the queen of an African migrant community says she’s “interested in Restorative justice” and in “understanding / Who [the warrior] hurt and why.” She gives the convicted man a year and a day to find out “what we feel—I mean we women.”
Smith’s version of this tale is informed by the #Metoo and Black Lives Matter movements and the high-profile cases that have given rise to them. Her themes—urgent today but as inexpressible in 18th-century Jamaica as they would have been in Chaucer’s England—include racism, sexism, and justice for the defenseless and disenfranchised. Though told by Alvita, the tale of the warrior and the queen ends as a plea for comity and communication between the sexes (a surprise in light of the Machiavellian view of marriage Alvita professes).
As the audience departs, the Ringham brothers’ playlist continues with Stevie Wonder’s “Feel It All Over” at full blast. That’s an apt choice. With Smith’s rowdy, humane comedy under their skin and in their hearts, spectators are indeed likely to be feeling it all over.
The Kiln Theatre presentation of The Wife of Willesden runs at the BAM Strong Harvey Theater (651 Fulton St., Brooklyn) through April 16. Evening performances are at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday; matinees are at 2 p.m. Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday. For tickets and more information, visit www.bam.org.
Playwright: Zadie Smith
Direction: Indhu Rubasingham
Sets & Costumes: Robert Jones
Lighting: Guy Hoare
Sound: Ben and Max Ringham
