The Wife of Willesden Read online

  Zadie Smith

  * * *

  THE WIFE OF WILLESDEN

  Incorporating:

  The Wife of Willesden’s Tale

  which tale is preceded by

  The General Lock-In

  and

  The Wife of Willesden’s Prologue

  and followed by

  A Retraction

  Told in verse couplets

  Translated from the Chaucerian into North Weezian

  On the occasion of the Brent 2020

  pilgrimage and celebration

  Contents

  About the Author

  Introduction: From Chaucerian to North Weezian (via Twitter)

  Dramatis Personae

  The Wife of Willesden The General Lock-In

  The Wife of Willesden’s Prologue

  The Wife of Willesden’s Tale

  A Retraction

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Zadie Smith is a novelist and essayist. She is the author of seven volumes of fiction and three essay collections. Since 2010 she has been a professor of creative writing at New York University. She is a member of both the American Academy of Letters and the Royal Society of Literature. The Wife of Willesden is her first work for the stage.

  By the same author

  FICTION

  White Teeth

  The Autograph Man

  On Beauty

  NW

  The Embassy of Cambodia

  Swing Time

  Grand Union

  NON-FICTION

  Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays

  Feel Free

  Intimations: Six Essays

  Dedicated to the Windrush generation, with much love and respect

  Presented by Kiln Theatre

  in association with

  Brent 2020, London Borough of Culture

  Introduction

  From Chaucerian to North Weezian (via Twitter)

  This is a weird one: sometime in early 2018, I got an email from one Lois Stonock, informing me that ‘we’ had won the bid to be London’s Borough of Culture 2020. I’m ashamed to admit it took me a minute to work out who this ‘we’ was and how I was included in it. Then I remembered: a year earlier I’d agreed to add my name to Brent’s bid although to be honest I had only the vaguest sense at the time of what I had said yes to, or what I would do if, out of the thirty-two boroughs of London, my beloved Brent somehow beat the statistical odds and won.

  Brent won. Lois’s emails picked up in their frequency. Would I write something about The Ends to celebrate The Ends? But this simple request proved difficult to manage. It was like being asked to breathe when breathing is sort of what you do on the regular. Everything I write is more or less about Brent, yet being explicitly asked to write about Brent sent me into a spiral of self-consciousness from which no writing seemed likely to emerge. Poor Lois kept emailing. The deadline crept closer. I worked myself up into a panic. Brent, I’d say to myself, as I sat at my desk, Brent. Brent! Brent? I tried getting more specific: Kilburn. The Kilburn High Road. So long, so wide and so old. During the writing of a novel of mine, NW, I’d read a lot about the Kilburn High Road and its history, and knew it was Celtic originally, then Roman, then Anglo-Saxon, with an ancient river buried deep beneath it. Once a part of Watling Street, it was a common route for medieval pilgrims, on their way to visit the shrine of St Albans, or the Black Madonna in St Mary’s, Willesden. Some of those pilgrims no doubt took their rest at Kilburn Priory (est. 1134), a famed local nunnery of Augustinian canonesses. Yes, the especially pious pilgrims would have stopped there. But surely many more people – basic types like you and me – would have paused in one of the pubs, like the Red Lion (1444) or the Cock Tavern (1486) for some ale and a pie and a bit of chat …

  One day, just as I received another anxious email from Lois, it happened that I spotted a copy of The Canterbury Tales on a shelf in front of me and, at a loss for what else to tell her, I spontaneously suggested that perhaps I could take this connection between Kilburn and Canterbury pilgrimages and translate the original Chaucer into the contemporary local vernacular: The Brondesbury Tales. Cute idea. But when I actually took down the Chaucer I was reminded that his tales are many and long and it might take me till 2030 to complete the task. Well, how about The Wife of Bath? Alas, this, too, was long. Well, how about a few verses of it, like a short monologue, the text of which we could put in our excellent Brent Magazine, or maybe even have a local actress perform it at the Kiln Theatre? Such was the plan.fn1

  About a month later, I was heading to Australia for a literary festival when Lois emailed me about approving a press release. But the attachment was taking too long to open on the bad airport Wi-Fi, so I said I was sure whatever it said was fine and I got on that plane. A day later I landed in Australia and opened my laptop to find dozens of emails – from friends, family, colleagues and some strangers – all eager to hear more about my ‘first play’. Not having written a play – or ever considered writing one – I was understandably a bit perturbed. I phoned my agent, who also congratulated me on my first play, and suggested I take a look at Twitter, which was apparently full of still more people almost as surprised as I was to find I had written a play. I then tried blaming Lois, but indeed in her press release she had said nothing about a play, although perhaps the word ‘monologue’ was, in retrospect, easily misinterpreted. I sat for a while in Sydney Airport and looked deep into the gaping void in myself where a play was meant to be. I went through my options: break own leg, contract short but serious illness, remain in Australia, explain to Twitter it was mistaken, or try to translate a fourteenth-century medieval text written in rhyming couplets into a contemporary piece about Kilburn …

  Which is all to say, when I sat down to write The Wife of Willesden I had no idea it would end up being one of the more delightful writing experiences of my life. I think, when we talk about ‘creativity’, not enough is said about the interesting role that limits, rules and restrictions can play. In this case, the rules of the game were almost absurdly constricting: a medieval text – concerning sexual politics that would seem as distant as the moon – constructed in rhyming couplets from lines of ten syllables each. Yet from the moment Alyson opens her mouth –

  Experience, though noon auctoritee

  Were in this world, were right ynogh to me

  To speke of wo that is in marriage

  – I knew that she was speaking to me, and that she was a Kilburn girl at heart. What started out as homework soon came to feel like a wonderful case of serendipity. For Alyson’s voice – brash, honest, cheeky, salacious, outrageous, unapologetic – is one I’ve heard and loved all my life: in the flats, at school, in the playgrounds of my childhood and then the pubs of my maturity, at bus stops, in shops, and of course up and down the Kilburn High Road, any day of the week. The words may be different but the spirit is the same. I loved the task of finding new words to fit. But just because you’re enjoying writing something doesn’t mean – in my experience – that it’s going well. Here Indhu Rubasingham, the formidable artistic director of the Kiln, was vital, both as first reader, dramaturgical advisor and final judge, for it would be up to Indhu to decide whether this play that she had neither asked for nor expected was a) actually a play and b) suitable for her theatre. So that became my new day job: turning Alyson from Bath into Alvita from Willesden, while trying to maintain Chaucer’s beautiful colloquial flow, those ten-syllable lines that rhyme without heaviness, and sing without ever actually becoming music. Chaucer wrote of the people and for them, never doubting that even the most rarefied religious, political and philosophical ideas could be conveyed in the language the people themselves speak. I have tried to maintai
n that democratic principle here.

  When the play was finished, and Indhu decided to stage it in full – and for more than the single night I’d imagined – I don’t think I have ever been more astounded in my life, nor more thrilled. To me, the Kiln is a sacred space: as a child I took drama lessons there, back when it was still the Tricycle, and I remember mourning the disastrous fire, and sharing in the local delight when a new theatre rose out of the ashes. I had so many of my earliest seminal theatrical experiences here. The Kiln is where I saw The Colour of Justice, about the Stephen Lawrence inquiry. It’s where I first saw Playboy of the West Indies. The only way I could make sense of adding myself to the history of this storied stage was by remembering that it’s really Chaucer up there – I’m only hiding in the folds of his garment.

  It must seem, to many, an odd partnership. When I started writing, it often felt that way to me, too. The distance between Canterbury and Kilburn, and between the fourteenth century and the twenty-first, looked epic. But I wasn’t very long on the road before the sympathetic rhymes between the two became audible and then deafening. ‘Sovereigntee’ began to sound a lot like ‘consent’, for example, and Alyson’s insistence on physical pleasure not unlike the sex-positivity movement, while her contempt for class privilege feels uncannily close to our debates on that topic today. Even the act of sexual violence that sits shockingly at the centre of her tale – and the restorative justice Alyson offers as a possible example of progressive punishment – read, to me, as absolutely contemporary. But that all makes it sound as if Alyson is a dogmatic sort, keen to impart serious moral and social lessons to her audience. Nothing could be further from the truth. Alyson shares with my own Alvita (I hope!) a startling indifference to the opinions of others and a passionate compulsion to live her own life as she pleases.

  She has nothing to hide. Her desire to dominate men she freely admits; her own occasional hypocrisies she does not disguise; her insatiable appetite for life she announces to all. Personally, I could listen to her day and night, but having been to the theatre myself, and being aware that audiences generally prefer plays to involve more than one person, I made the decision early on to parcel out some of Alyson’s scattershot wisdom and opinions to the various other people she speaks about, for and through.

  Still, despite the fact that Alyson has turned into Alvita – and then been split many times over into all her husbands and friends – the text is, for the most part, a direct transposition of the Wife of Bath’s prologue and tale. Here and there I have made judgement calls, substituting contemporary references for ones I thought too obscure to be meaningful to contemporary audiences. For example, the Pardoner, the Summoner and the Friar – all of whom make brief appearances in the Wife of Bath’s prologue – have been transformed, respectively, into their modern vocational equivalents: a charity chugger, a bailiff, and the minister of a local megachurch. I have also taken a few liberties with the structure. All of Chaucer’s tales are framed and bookended by the opening General Prologue and the final Retraction; the same is true here, but I have radically paraphrased – and mercifully shortened – both. The greatest change, perhaps, is in the tale itself, which has been switched from Arthurian England to eighteenth-century Jamaica. Try as I might, I couldn’t imagine Alvita using King Arthur as a point of reference. These transformations aside, I’m proud to call the Wife of Bath and the Wife of Willesden half-sisters. I’ve so enjoyed my time with both of these wild women. I’d like to claim Alvita is the more feisty of the two, but the truth is you’ll find all her feistiness in the original. That said, she certainly is more Kilburn and more Jamaica. She nah easy and she talk her mind.

  Dramatis Personae

  In order of appearance

  ALVITA, THE WIFE OF WILLESDEN A Jamaican-born British woman in her mid-fifties

  AUTHOR A brown woman in a headwrap

  PUBLICAN POLLY The woman who runs the Colin Campbell pub

  AUNTIE P Alvita’s churchgoing aunt

  PASTOR JEGEDE A Nigerian minister at a North London megachurch

  KELLY Alvita’s very shy niece

  HUSBAND NO. 1, IAN An older, white Englishman

  HUSBAND NO. 2, DARREN A young, good-looking bwoy

  HUSBAND NO. 3, WINSTON A Rastaman

  HUSBAND NO. 4, ELRIDGE A well-to-do gentleman in his fifties, of Caribbean heritage

  HUSBAND NO. 5, RYAN A Scottish student doing his Masters

  GOD

  ST PAUL

  BLACK JESUS

  ZAIRE Alvita’s best friend

  COLIN A charity chugger in his early twenties

  SOPHIE Colin’s fiancée

  NELSON MANDELA

  ASMA Local rebel wife

  SOCRATES

  ERIPHYLE A bad wife of legend

  ARRIUS A vengeful husband of legend

  BARTOSZ A local bailiff

  STAGEHAND 1 A child

  STAGEHAND 2 A child

  QUEEN NANNY Our Maroon hero of Old Jamaica

  YOUNG MAROON A soldier in Queen Nanny’s army

  OLD WIFE An Obeah woman of advanced years

  The same actors play:

  Author, Kelly, Zaire, Eriphyle and Queen Nanny

  Publican Polly, God and Sophie

  Auntie P and Old Wife

  Pastor Jegede and Husband Elridge

  Husband Ian, St Paul, Socrates, Arrius and Bartosz

  Husband Darren, Colin and Young Maroon

  Husband Winston, Black Jesus and Nelson Mandela

  Incidental characters and choruses are

  played by members of the cast.

  THE WIFE OF WILLESDEN

  The General Lock-In

  We are inside the Colin Campbell, a small pub on the Kilburn High Road. The sun is setting on the celebrations of the announcement: Brent is to be the Borough of Culture for 2020. People are pouring into the pub for refreshment and rest. A large banner above the bar reads: ‘The Kilburn High Road Pub Crawl’. Another sign reads: ‘BRENT BOROUGH OF CULTURE: 2020’.

  The Campbell is a quiet pub, usually occupied by a few all-day lone drinkers, but today these old men in their wrinkled suits are suddenly inundated by a colourful crowd. There’s been dancing; some people are in carnival-like costume; there are people in their national dress, families, teenagers, lovers. Every possible kind of person. The bar staff struggle to serve the influx of people and seat them all, but after a bit of kerfuffle, most have a table, and now begin opening packets of crisps, or their own tubs of home-made food …

  There is, in one corner, a little makeshift stage, with a home-made sign hanging behind: ‘Celebrating Local Stories’. A red-headed young man with his back to the audience has a video camera on a stand, ready to film whoever comes up to talk – but people seem reluctant. Music is playing, footie is on the TV, we can’t hear the people, but we see lots of little local dramas and conversations playing out, and may notice one especially striking woman, ALVITA, WIFE OF WILLESDEN. She’s settling seating arguments, she’s handing over pints to people who can’t reach the bar, laughing and joking with everyone …

  In one corner, the AUTHOR sits, quieter than the rest, with a laptop on her table.

  AUTHOR

  It was the summer of 2019.

  I was back home, checking the local scene

  And the whole neighbourhood was in the streets

  To celebrate the recent local feat:

  Winning the London Borough of Culture.

  Call it a pilgrimage: all together

  We crawled down Kilburn High Road, until we

  Reached the Colin Campbell. We drank. Polly

  Bailey, who runs it, suggested a

  WHOLE CAST

  LOCK-IN!

  PUBLICAN POLLY

  Let’s get our drink on with the whole block.

  And, wait, listen: here’s what we’re gonna do:

  From right now till … let’s say … half past two

  We’ll have a little contest. Your stories

  On that stage
. I’ll be the judge and MC.

  And when everyone’s told their tale, the best

  One will receive a full English Breakfast

  Tomorrow morning, on the house. With chips.

  All cheer.

  AUTHOR

  Everyone got on their open-mic tip …

  We had all types of people in that night,

  Young and old, rich and poor, black, brown and white –

  But local: students, merchants, a bailiff,

  People from church, temple, mosque, shul. And if

  There’s a person in Brent who doesn’t think

  Their own life story isn’t just the thing

  To turn into a four-hundred-page book

  I’d like to meet them. So off they went. Look

  At them.

  We see people encouraging each other up to tell short stories from their life, and the reaction of the crowds.

  All telling their stories. Mostly

  Men. Not because they had better stories

  But because they had no doubt that we should

  Hear them. The night wore on. I wondered: Would

  A woman speak? And one or two did. But

  Like the men – like most of us – they said what

  They thought others wanted to hear. Or lied,

  Or humble-bragged, or said the nice, polite

  Clichéd things that nice people like to say …

  We see a man and woman on the stage together and we hear the following snippet.

  FEMALE SPEAKER

  He’s just ‘the one’ – we get married in May.

  He’s like my rock? Wouldn’t you say so, Steven?

  MALE SPEAKER