PositiveThe Guardian (UK)With bawdy humour and an ear for gossip, it’s a love letter to her local area ... 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 ... 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 ... Nevertheless, Smith is brilliant at sowing the seeds of characters, giving little snippets that build them fully and immediately.
