A Taste of Honey

It frankly beggars belief that Shelagh Delaney was still in her teens when she wrote her first, and best known, play. In contrast to the classic kitchen sink dramas of angry young men such as John Osborne and Arnold Wesker, Delaney’s work is filled with good humour and acerbic stoicism that has more in common with Alan Bennett. Nonetheless, it’s hard to imagine the impact it must have had at the time, and I confess I came to this production wondering how to view it. Should I somehow try and put myself in the shoes of an audience shocked by a white girl falling in love with a black man, only to then fall pregnant, before moving in with a gay man? If I can’t do that, then what would I be watching, other than a curiosity that was certainly ground breaking, but could hardly speak to a modern audience in the same way? Fortunately, this sparking, handsomely dressed production, managed to twist and turn just enough to allow a fresh appreciation of this well-known text.
 
George Bird was already playing drums as the audience took to their seats, after which Alex Davies joined him on bass, followed by David O’Brien on keyboards. The cast then started milling about on stage, puffing furiously on E cigarettes as the band noodled away. It was a classic bit of high-concept business from the National Theatre, blurring the edges of a play that is too old to be contemporary yet too young to be called period. It was only when the light started dimming that the audience caught on, seemingly one by one, that the play was properly about to start, and it was time to quiet down. Audaciously, characters in this production break into song, underlining an internal monologue of heart breaking hope, and when Jodie Prenger was the first to do so she quickly made her presence felt with a fine singing voice. It was clear (and not just from the billing and publicity) that Helen, the mother, was at the forefront of this outing for the play. The uninitiated might reasonably suppose A Taste of Honey was all about her, a bold and brassy goodtime girl (as the age would have it) from these opening moments. Living off the favours of her fancy men, this was the selfish, uncaring mother propped up on booze we had come to expect, but in Prenger’s hands she also displayed an underlying fragility. The inference was clear – she was as much a victim of circumstance as her daughter, and if she was a terrible person then it was one that had been made not born.
 
Hers was a big performance, in marked contrast to Gemma Dobson’s nicely understated Josephine, to the extent that anyone more familiar with the film adaptation (that would be me) might find themselves disorientated by the focus of attention. Jo is presented here is inconvenient brattish distraction- something in the way rather than what we should be looking at. It’s a clever sleight of hand by director Bijam Sheibani that went some way towards freshening up the narrative, though it wasn’t without its drawbacks. Jo’s romance with Darren Stokes’s Jimmy is a little undercooked as a consequence, the young couple’s dalliance appearing to be a subplot rather that the motivating force behind the drama’s trajectory. Viewed through the prism of the 1950s, it is startling that she is befriended a young black man, but in an age of colour blind casting it wasn’t immediately obvious whether we were supposed to see the colour of his skin as a dramatic trigger.
 
Similarly, when her friend Geoffrey appears, his sexual orientation is only obliquely referred to, so while this would presumably have been yet another shock to the sensibilities of 50s Britain, a modern audience can’t help but wonder what the fuss is all about. Far more striking was how the play came alive at the appearance of Stuart Thompson in what was an astonishingly assured stage debut. Whether it was the interplay between the actors, or that Delaney’s writing was simply sharper when writing characters her own age, sparks started to fly onstage when the two of them sparred.
 
Ultimately, we were never going to see an easy conclusion to a play that doesn’t so much end as fizzle out, in a way that Delaney is surely suggesting happens in life. It was a pity that, as Jo was left to ponder on her life turning full circle, a dullard from the audience (presumably intent on proving he knew the text) starting clapping like a seal, destroying a rare moment of calm. The intended pathos of a life lived uncertainly was consequently lost to us, but in an age of food banks, zero hour contracts and a gig economy, some of the play’s abiding message still seemed alarmingly relevant. It also says much for this production that a cocktail of an unmarried teenage pregnancy, gay friendships, mixed race relationships, alcoholism and unremitting poverty, could be presented with such defiant stoicism and good humour.