Review: Zadie Smith Gives Chaucer’s Wife of Bath a Modern Makeover (Sort Of) in The Wife of Willesden

Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, from his Middle English classic The Canterbury Tales, is one of literature’s most famous characters, for good reason. Not only is she a highly entertaining storyteller, she’s also considered by many to be a proto-feminist hero, unabashedly marrying five husbands, advocating for women’s sexual liberation, and demanding that wives call the shots over subservient husbands. As someone who saw the need for a complete overhaul of men’s attitudes toward women, she was way ahead of her time.

Novelist Zadie Smith chose the Wife of Bath as the subject for her debut play, The Wife of Willesden, now running at BAM’s Harvey Theater under the direction of Indhu Rubasingham. The choice seems pertinent now, especially for American audiences, as the rights of women to control their own physical destinies have come under attack. To be sure, there’s a lot of overlap between the silly ways that people (especially men) behaved in Chaucer’s day and the way they act now, and much of this play’s comedy comes from translating that silliness into a modern idiom. Yet in trying to bring the Wife of Bath into the modern era, Smith is a bit too timid in her retelling, and a little too respectful to Chaucer, whose Wife has some of the male medieval mindset swimming around in her brain. Unfortunately, Smith’s Wife does too.

Like The Canterbury Tales, Smith couches her story of the Wife, whose name in this retelling is Alvita (Clare Perkins), within a framing device. In the Tales, it’s a pilgrimage in which a couple dozen travelers tell stories to pass the time. Here, it’s a contest in a North West London bar, tended by barkeep Polly (Claudia Grant), to see who can tell the best story (Robert Jones’s impressive set, with scores of liquor bottles lining the walls, doubles as a discotheque later). The stories start out pretty dull, but Alvita steps in to save everyone from complete boredom.

Perkins is all energy and pizzazz as the loud, exuberant, and talkative Alvita. Wearing a sexy red dress (costumes also by Jones), this middle-aged wife is not slowing down for anyone, and she’s eager to tell us why, beginning with a lengthy autobiographical “prologue” and finally ending with her story. She’s been married five times: The first three husbands (Marcus Adolphy, Andrew Frame, and Troy Glasgow) were “good,” and by that she means subservient. They weren’t necessarily good in bed (a comical masturbation scene with Frame drives this point home), but they at least knew their place. None of them came remotely close to Alvita’s ideal man, Nelson Mandela (Adolphy).

The fourth one (George Eggay) was a jealous complainer, so there was no love lost when he kicked the bucket; but the fifth, Ryan (Scott Miller), was an abuser who clocked her upside the head and left her deaf in one ear.

In Chaucer, men have a remarkable ability to change their behavior for the better on a dime. But this isn’t generally how it works in real life, so it seems strange that Smith too gives Ryan an inexplicable change of heart. He suddenly becomes devoted to Alvita after they talk, and he vows never to mistreat her again. It’s with this last husband that Alvita remains in wedded bliss, deaf ear and all.

While Smith was updating scenarios and language, it’s curious that she didn’t also update the Wife’s response to her abusive husband, which seems oddly out of character for Chaucer’s Wife and seems especially off-key for Smith’s. It’s that kind of pandering to Chaucer that makes Wife of Willesden less a modern play than a rejiggered homage to a dead man who never quite escaped the conventional attitudes of his time.

It seems that Smith also felt compelled to honor her source by writing her play in rhymed couplets (a particularly annoying choice even when Shakespeare did it). To her credit, she manages to cleverly hide many of these earwig rhymes in run-on lines and unexpected syllables, and the actors do a good job of covering them up. But other than trying to remain true to the original tale, there’s was no need to bother.

As though director Rubasingham were aware that Alvita’s monologuing and rhyming couplets might begin to have a soporific effect, we are periodically jarred to attention by dance interludes, illuminated by pop songs and a glittering disco ball above (rousing sound design by Ben and Max Ringham and clubby lighting by Guy Hoare). It’s during these quick scenes that the cast seems to be having the most fun. For me the music and bright lights were a welcome relief from the talking.

As for the Wife’s tale itself, Smith removes it from Arthurian times and replants it in Jamaica, where a “Young Maroon” (Glasgow) rapes a woman (Nikita Johal) and goes to trial for his crime. He is sentenced by the island’s imperious leader Queen Nanny (Jessica Murrain) to discover, in one year’s time, the one thing that all women want. An old crone (Ellen Thomas) gives him the answer (women want subservient husbands, apparently) on condition that he marry her. He does, and when he submits to her every command, she turns into a beautiful, faithful young wife.

From its trite biblical debates about sex at the beginning to that story’s fantastical ending, The Wife of Willesden can seem more of Chaucer’s time than our own, despite its modern trappings. (Smith concludes the play with a superfluous Chaucerian “retraction” in which Smith, played by Murrain, apologizes for the cultural appropriation in her novels.) In the end, Alvida lacks the iconoclastic punch of her predecessor. Chaucer’s Wife, for all her flaws, didn’t hesitate to give the men of her era a knee to the balls. It’s too bad that Smith’s Wife doesn’t give a new knee to the men of ours.