Smith wrote her first play, The Wife of Willesden after learning that her borough in London, Brent, had been selected in 2018 as the 2020 London Borough of Culture. She chose to adapt "The Wife of Bath's Tale" in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, recalling how she had translated Chaucer into contemporary English during her studies at Cambridge.[6] The retelling replaces the pilgrimage with a pub crawl set in contemporary London, with the Wife of Bath becoming Alvita, a Jamaican-born British woman in her mid-50s who challenges her Auntie P's traditional Christian views on sex and marriage. Like the original tale, Alvita is a woman who has had five husbands, her experiences with them ranging from pleasant to traumatic. The majority of the piece is spent on her talking to the people in the pub, in much the way that the Wife of Bath's prologue is longer than the tale itself. To her, Alvita's voice is a common one that she heard growing up in Brent, and thus writing this play was a natural choice for the festival. The tale itself is set in early 18th-century Jamaica, where a man guilty of rape is brought before Queen Nanny of the Maroons, who decrees that his punishment is to go and find what women truly desire.[1][7][8]
