For her debut play, bestselling author Zadie Smith has adapted The Wife of Bath, from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, for 21st-century north-west London. With bawdy humour and an ear for gossip, it’s a love letter to her local area set in a pub that is loud, crowded and bustling with life. One of the best known Tales, The Wife of Bath sees an outspoken woman talking about the power of her body over her husbands. 600 years later, the character – here called Alvita, played brilliantly by Clare Perkins with a loose tongue and a loud laugh – still speaks to us; we couldn’t stop her if we tried. This is essentially a monologue with eager extras. Smith’s pilgrimage is a pub crawl, and we’ve stopped for a lock-in at the Sir Colin Campbell, a real Irish pub situated down the road from the theatre. The old pub is luminously designed by Robert Jones, with a semicircular bar lined with bottles running the length of the theatre, with some of the audience seated at bar tables. Centre stage is Alvita, ready to regale us with the disaster stories of her five former husbands, and the lessons she’s learned about men along the way. It’s good fun. The Wife of Bath was revolutionary, for in a world where a woman was defined by her marital status, here was one who had married five times, and who talked unashamedly about sex. In this slightly tipsy setting, Smith steps it up for a modern audience, describing who gave the best head, and who couldn’t get it up. Around our protagonist, the author of NW and Swing Time gives us bickering pilgrims in the form of a band of strangers you might bump into on Kilburn High Road. Speaking in verse, the cast of 10 leap into different characters as Alvita’s stories move from one husband to the next. Even Jesus makes an appearance, a bar tray creatively forming his halo. The show is divided, as was Chaucer’s writing, into prologue and tale. You don’t need to have studied the 14th-century poem to enjoy the mix of characters in either, although Smith’s script is more impressive the closer you’ve read the original text. There is clever mimicry in the way Smith echoes Chaucer’s work, adapting his tale from Arthurian England to 18th-century Jamaica, but there are moments where the play gets lost in its own tangents. By sticking to a relatively faithful adaptation of Chaucer’s verse, there is too a certain sense of stagnancy. As we jump from one story to another, the overall show lacks a sense of development, and some elements feel hammered in unnecessarily – though for those, I’ll blame Chaucer. Perhaps it’s a curse of adapting a sprawling text; you get the brilliant parts as well as those that go on a bit. Nevertheless, Smith is brilliant at sowing the seeds of characters, giving little snippets that build them fully and immediately. Her writing also has a physical humour that director Indhu Rubasingham and movement directors Imogen Knight and Celise Hicks translate effortlessly onstage; getting the men to grind to Cardi B’s WAP has the room cackling. Presented in association with Brent Borough of Culture, The Wife of Willesden is a celebration of community and local legends, of telling a good story and living a life worth telling. Not bad for an original text that’s 600 years old.