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Shelagh Delaney put working-class women centre-stage for the first time. This thoughtful book argues for the originality and importance of the Salford playwright
In 1958 A Taste of Honey opened at Theatre Royal Stratford East by the skin of its teeth. The lord chamberlain had grudgingly passed the play for performance only because it showed “such a sad collection of undesirables that it can’t do much harm”. It told the story of a teenage girl, her promiscuous mother, her drunk stepfather, a black sailor who gets her pregnant and her gay art student friend who helps with the baby. Kenneth Tynan loved it, the Spectator thought it “awful, amateurish” and the people of Salford, where it was set, worried what the neighbours would think.
The author, 19-year-old Shelagh Delaney, had written the piece in a creative fever following a visit with workmates to see Terence Rattigan’s latest play at Manchester Opera House. Rattigan’s well-tailored drawing room drama didn’t make Delaney angry, she said later, but it did make her laugh, and not in a good way. “Convinced I could do better”, she “just went home and started work”. Within a fortnight she had produced a ragged playscript that skidded all over the place yet radiated a defiant sense of its right to exist. In this version of post-industrial northern England, characters shout, swear, say unforgivable things to each other and don’t see why on earth they should bother being grateful. The women in particular were a revelation. Helen and Jo don’t hanker after a nice suburban council house, a nice office job or even a nice husband. Instead they want a “taste of honey”: clothes, jazz clubs, love – for which read sex – on their own terms. Continue reading...