Book of the Week

It's World Bee Day on Thursday (see here for more info) - and appropriately enough, our book of the week is A Taste of Honey by Shelagh Delaney, recommended by Eddie Atkinson

First performed in 1958, A Taste of Honey was written by 19 year old Shelagh Delaney and adapted for film in 1961, as well as inspiring a jazz standard since recorded by the Beatles, Barbara Streisand and, inexplicably, Billy Dee Williams (a discovery that allowed me to become one of the privileged 2,000 or so people to have listened to a fairly large chunk of Lando Calrissian’s discography yet left him still only the second most musically successful actor to have played the character).

Having first encountered this play through senior play reading society (meeting at 12:40 on Fridays in Mr Anthony’s classroom for Lower Eighths and virtually for everyone else: see here for more information), I was struck by how progressive the issues it dealt with were for the time of performance. 

Shelagh Delaney

The play was written at a time when homosexuality was illegal and the Lord Chamberlain censored all plays to be performed in the country, and Delaney provides one of the earliest positive portrayals of homosexuality and interracial love in British theatre, although some problematic moments remain present. The piece centres on teenager Jo and her relationship with her drunk, irresponsible and generally not very nice mother Helen and her even nastier husband; her love affair with Jimmy, a black sailor; and her friendship with Geoff, a gay student.

The play was part of the Kitchen Sink Realism theatrical movement, in which writers rebelled against the tradition of theatre portraying rich nobility and aimed at the middle classes, instead making working class Britain their focal point and focusing on the realities of poor characters living in cramped urban accommodation in contrast to the escapism of the ‘well-made plays’ of the previous generation. Writers tended to use their work as a medium for expression of social frustration, with the figure of the ‘angry young man’ (an intelligent protagonist delivering socially critical speeches) a central idea, most famously Jimmy Porter in John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger. 

Michael Sheen as Jimmy Porter in the National Theatre's revival of Look Back in Anger

Delaney follows this realism for the most part, but there are some key differences in her style; her criticisms are mixed with genuine comedy, and the play itself was originally performed with a live band and in rowdier venues than the West End - the script is littered with fourth wall breaks. Tony Richardson's film adaptation of the play contains slight differences, including a removal of some of its claustrophobia through the presence of more characters and a greater variety of settings, but was adapted by Delaney also and is beautifully shot by cinematographer Walter Lassally.

While other themes come to the fore at points, the focus of the piece is very much Jo’s toxic yet witty relationship with her mother and her search for family stability. Throughout the play different possible familial arrangements (conventional and unconventional) rise and fall and are not all entirely successful, yet within these rises and falls each character experiences moments where they appear to have finally found happiness in the arrangements, their ‘taste[s] of honey’.

Kate O'Flynn and Lesley Sharp in the National Theatre's recent production of A Taste of Honey

Overall, Delaney’s work takes on a fairly pessimistic tone, the most dispiriting message of the play being one of the cyclicality of pain: poverty leads to poverty and terrible circumstances for the mother lead to terrible circumstances for the daughter, whose daughter will suffer in turn.

You can watch Tony Richardson's adaptation of A Taste of Honey on BFI Player here and read Jeanette Winterson's post about Shelagh Delaney on the British Library website here.