Given Smith’s talent for dialogue, it was only a matter of time before she wrote a play. Her first, and only, work for the stage is a riotous reworking of The Wife of Bath’s Tale from Canterbury Tales, transported to an open-mic night at a pub on the Kilburn High Road. Chaucer’s Alyson becomes Alvita, a five-times married Jamaican-born British woman in her mid-50s. Her voice, “brash, honest, cheeky, salacious, outrageous, unapologetic is one I’ve heard and loved all my life”, Smith writes in the introduction. “She’s been that bitch since 1983,” the audience is told. First performed at Kilburn’s Kiln theatre, it transferred to the National in London (you can still watch it on their website) and to New York. Bawdy and brave, here is a woman speaking her truth down the centuries.