– I knew that she was speaking to me, and that she was a Kilburn girl at heart. What started out as homework soon came to feel like a wonderful case of serendipity. For Alyson’s voice – brash, honest, cheeky, salacious, outrageous, unapologetic – is one I’ve heard and loved all my life: in the flats, at school, in the playgrounds of my childhood and then the pubs of my maturity, at bus stops, in shops, and of course up and down the Kilburn High Road, any day of the week. The words may be different but the spirit is the same. I loved the task of finding new words to fit. But just because you’re enjoying writing something doesn’t mean – in my experience – that it’s going well. Here Indhu Rubasingham, the formidable artistic director of the Kiln, was vital, both as first reader, dramaturgical advisor and final judge, for it would be up to Indhu to decide whether this play that she had neither asked for nor expected was a) actually a play and b) suitable for her theatre. So that became my new day job: turning Alyson from Bath into Alvita from Willesden, while trying to maintain Chaucer’s beautiful colloquial flow, those ten-syllable lines that rhyme without heaviness, and sing without ever actually becoming music. Chaucer wrote of the people and for them, never doubting that even the most rarefied religious, political and philosophical ideas could be conveyed in the language the people themselves speak. I have tried to maintain that democratic principle here.

When the play was finished, and Indhu decided to stage it in full – and for more than the single night I’d imagined – I don’t think I have ever been more astounded in my life, nor more thrilled. To me, the Kiln is a sacred space: as a child I took drama lessons there, back when it was still the Tricycle, and I remember mourning the disastrous fire, and sharing in the local delight when a new theatre rose out of the ashes. I had so many of my earliest seminal theatrical experiences here. The Kiln is where I saw The Colour of Justice, about the Stephen Lawrence inquiry. It’s where I first saw Playboy of the West Indies. The only way I could make sense of adding myself to the history of this storied stage was by remembering that it’s really Chaucer up there – I’m only hiding in the folds of his garment.