A Taste of Honey
A Play By Shelagh Delaney
I saw the film, starring Dora Bryan and Rita Tushingham, when it was first released in the early 60s. It was yet another story of working class, northern Britain to go along with Look Back in Anger, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Room at the Top and This Sporting Life, a healthy antidote to Terence Rattigan and Noel Coward.
But fifty years later the striking feature of A Taste of Honey turns out to be its feminine, perhaps rather than feminist, outlook. On reflection the Angry Young Men were at least as angry with their unfortunate girl-friends as they were with being chippy, working class heroes. Jimmy Porter is callous towards his wife as he looks back in anger; Arthur Seaton is casually chauvinist both on Saturday night and Sunday morning; Joe Lampton is carelessly dismissive of girlfriend and mistress when searching for room at the top; and Fred Machin finds his landlady more complex to manage than the rawness of life as a rugby league footballer.
But in A Taste of Honey Shelagh Delaney’s men are at the same time both sideshows and more varied than the angry young men. There is the gentle, charming but transient black man – Josephine’s lover; Peter, mother Helen’s feckless, drunken, debauched husband/lover and the more interesting gay Geoffrey, who shows an inclination to stay the course as Joe’s friend but does not have either the toughness or courage to manage it.
No, the women are the heroes. They are unsentimental, tough as old boots, far from totally admirable, but they are the stuff of life and continuity. They will bear and manage the child to come. They are what makes working-class Salford work, in this rather grim portrayal of 1950s Lancashire. They reminded me of Ma Joad in The Grapes of Wrath, the epitome of tough women in a tough world.
That Delaney could write such a play, her first, at the age of 20 having seen a Rattigan play at the age of 18 in her first experience of the theatre and concluding that she could do better makes her exceptional. That she could write it in 10 days having left school at 15 makes her a phenomenon.
With two leading female parts, Joe as the pregnant teenager and Helen, her licentious, irresponsible mother, and its handling of racial and sexual diversities, Delaney’s play was certainly not the standard fare of the British kitchen sink drama of the 1950s. It was rather a precursor of a more diverse society shaped by industrial decline and a search for new values. I thought, with only my memories of the film, that it was probably not going to be very relevant to today – I was wrong. It is of a different age but it is relevant and well worth a visit to the National’s Lyttelton Theatre.
The production itself was not, however, quite up to the play. The staging and the direction were up to the National’s normal high standard even if the revolving stage of miserable working-class Salford, interior and exterior, was predictable. The acting, however, did not quite ring true. Lesley Sharp was more arch than I would expect the feckless Helen to be, and whilst her Mancunian accent did not need to be perfect, it sounded a bit mid-Atlantic to me. Kate O’Flynn’s Josephine was certainly not self-pitying but somehow not engrossing either.
The male parts were relatively minor but Harry Hepple as the gay Geoffrey stole the acting honours. His was no caricature but a sensitive account of what it might be like to be a gay, would-be father and caring confidant in a brutally macho world. That Geoffrey could not stand the pressure did not come as a surprise.
Overall, Shelagh Delaney brought a new voice to the theatre and to the interpretation of women’s role. She deserves to be re-instated as a star of the theatre and given a larger, very working-class part in the feminist pantheon.
Tony Belton
Tony Belton 