After decades as a celebrated novelist, Zadie Smith has turned to playwriting for her latest tale of London life, “The Wife of Willesden”
Zadie Smith did not intend to write a play. She is devoted to novels—writing them, reading them—and at age 47, she already senses that she is racing against time: “I would love to write the books I have in my mind before I die.” When Brent, the area of northwest London where she lives, applied to be London’s “Borough of Culture” for 2020, she was asked to add her name and agreed as a lark, she explains. Brent won, and Ms. Smith had to write something for the celebration.
“I feel guilty that all of this is my fault,” Ms. Smith says over the phone from her hotel in Boston, just before her play’s recent run at Harvard’s American Repertory Theater. She explains that it has been both “extraordinary” and discomfiting to watch her words performed to packed houses. “I’m not there when you open my book, so if you hate it I don’t have to know, but in theater you know when the crowd is bored or doesn’t like it,” she says.
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