It must seem, to many, an odd partnership. When I started writing, it often felt that way to me, too. The distance between Canterbury and Kilburn, and between the fourteenth century and the twenty-first, looked epic. But I wasn’t very long on the road before the sympathetic rhymes between the two became audible and then deafening. ‘Sovereigntee’ began to sound a lot like ‘consent’, for example, and Alyson’s insistence on physical pleasure not unlike the sex-positivity movement, while her contempt for class privilege feels uncannily close to our debates on that topic today. Even the act of sexual violence that sits shockingly at the centre of her tale – and the restorative justice Alyson offers as a possible example of progressive punishment – read, to me, as absolutely contemporary. But that all makes it sound as if Alyson is a dogmatic sort, keen to impart serious moral and social lessons to her audience. Nothing could be further from the truth. Alyson shares with my own Alvita (I hope!) a startling indifference to the opinions of others and a passionate compulsion to live her own life as she pleases.

She has nothing to hide. Her desire to dominate men she freely admits; her own occasional hypocrisies she does not disguise; her insatiable appetite for life she announces to all. Personally, I could listen to her day and night, but having been to the theatre myself, and being aware that audiences generally prefer plays to involve more than one person, I made the decision early on to parcel out some of Alyson’s scattershot wisdom and opinions to the various other people she speaks about, for and through.