A Taste Of Honey - Richmond

Reviewed By: Charles Spencer

It's no surprise that Morrissey adores Shelagh Delaney and put the writer on the cover of a couple of Smiths records. Both hail from Salford, but, more significantly, they have a similar artistic temperament - melancholy, wry, utterly idiosyncratic.

Delaney began writing A Taste of Honey when she was only 17, and sent it to Joan Littlewood at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, who hailed her as a genius and gave the play its première in 1958.

The teenage dramatist saw it transfer first to the West End, then to Broadway, and subsequently wrote the screenplay for the 1961 movie version, directed by Tony Richardson and starring the young Rita Tushingham. The picture is still regarded as a classic of that brief period in the late 1950s and the early '60s when the British film industry really seemed to be on to something new and exciting.

I suspect Delaney herself must regard the piece as a curse as well as a blessing, for she has never subsequently matched her first astonishing success. But as the Royal Court celebrates its 50th anniversary, the Old Vic prepares to revive The Entertainer, and John Osborne is the subject of a fine new biography by John Heilpern, it is fascinating to get a view of kitchen-sink drama from a female perspective.

What's surprising about A Taste of Honey is how fresh it still seems. Its story of Jo, the illegitimate schoolgirl daughter of a feckless, selfish Salford slapper, who first gets herself pregnant by a black sailor, then finds companionship and comfort with a homosexual young man, must have seemed bravely unconventional in 1958. The sexual morality is certainly far looser than anything in Osborne's actually highly traditional Look Back in Anger.

And at her best, Delaney writes like a dream, conjuring a whole world of social and emotional deprivation in a grotty Salford bedsit, and creating an all-too-plausible account of the damage an unloving mother can inflict on a child - a pattern that seems doomed to repeat itself as the action progresses.

Stuart Wood's scrappily designed production, first staged at the Oldham Coliseum, could do with a snappier pace and a sharper sense of period detail. Why use the Beatles' version of A Taste of Honey when it was recorded five years later?

But where it matters, the play is often both powerfully affecting and tartly comic. Samantha Robinson plays Jo with a dreamy vulnerability, suggesting a young woman, to borrow Larkin's fine line, who finds herself pushed to the side of her own life. Her mother has no time for her, and ruthlessly dumps her whenever a new fancy man appears, and when the black sailor arrives on the scene, poor Jo seems to know she will be abandoned even as she surrenders to his tender charms.

Robinson also poignantly captures Jo's fear that her child may be mentally damaged, having belatedly learnt from her mother that her own dad was retarded.

Samantha Giles gives a horribly persuasive performance as her part-time prostitute of a mother, entirely wrapped up in her own selfish desires, and with a whining rasp of a voice that becomes almost unendurable as the play wears on. And there is fine support from Bruno Langley as the kind, gay art student who provides Jo with the only care and domestic comfort she has ever known, and Chris Jack as the likeable sailor who never returns.

This is an achingly sad study of lives that have gone awry, and it lodges itself in the memory like a painful splinter.

© The Telegraph, 6/6/06

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