A Taste Of Honey - Richmond

Reviewed By: Amanda Hodges

Still fresh and vividly evoking a young girl's rites of passage in Fifties Salford, Shelagh Delaney's first play – written as a teenager – possesses a powerful appeal. When it first appeared in 1958, produced by Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop, it shattered many taboos with its straightforward presentation of a black and gay character, something in an era where homosexuality was still considered a criminal offence. Tony Richardson's memorable film of 1961 – starring a young Rita Tushingham – firmly anchored A Taste of Honey as a work of seminal importance.

'I want to write for the theatre but I know so very little about it,' wrote Delaney to Joan Littlewood when she first submitted her manuscript for consideration. But her first attempt at a play was a triumph, a work praised by no less than Graham Greene for having ‘all the freshness of Mr Osborne's Look Back in Anger and a greater maturity’.

Although Stuart Wood's production is uneven overall you can still sense the impact Delaney's drama must have had in a theatrical world where the only strong northern protagonists depicted were male in dramas like Saturday Night Sunday Morning or Room at the Top.

As the play opens, Jo, a feisty and unconventional teenager, has just moved into a dingy attic in Salford with her mother Helen, a woman to whom the concept of maternal nurture is clearly a state with which she has scant acquaintance.

Liz Ascroft's design is so atmospheric that the set almost becomes a character in its own right, vividly conjuring the narrow confines of Jo's world with just a glimpse of wider horizons at one corner of the stage.

Swiftly taking up with a lascivious younger boyfriend Helen neglects her daughter but Jo is nothing if not resilient and eventually sets up home with her gay friend Geoffrey before life provides yet another testing twist to her tale.

Kenneth Tynan was right in saying that in other hands the play's inherent poignancy would have turned into a tragedy but somehow, despite this, it retains a buoyancy, just like its heroine, that eschews a descent into pathos.

Samantha Giles seems somewhat miscast as Helen, her adoption of a rather false Northern accent obscuring her credibility but happily Samantha Robinson is infinitely more persuasive as the defiant Jo, determined to eke out some satisfaction out of what appears a rather impoverished life.

The background of 50s rock and roll that accompanies the play works particularly well for Jo's spontaneous dance with Geoffrey – Bruno Langley – in a brief and thus all the more moving moment of domestic solace. Most of the performances – Giles aside – are strong but it's Robinson's Jo who makes you care and though one often longs for tauter direction her performance evokes Jo's defiant courage with a creditable conviction that carries you along.

© Rogues and Vagabonds, 6/6/06

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