46
than a decade before the Women’s
Liberation Movement emerged in
Britain”, her characters “challenged
the assumption that women
found fulfi lment in marriage and
motherhood”. They “openly longed
for a taste of honey, craving love,
creativity, adventure and escape ”.
Note her title’s optimistic plural- Tastes of Honey – the S that asks
for more.
Todd engagingly champions
Shelagh Delaney through thick and
thin (and there were thin patches)
and makes an unassailable case for
her importance in British theatre
history while showing how her
posthumous reputation has been
subtly slighted. What a formidable
ally Todd makes – all the more
powerful for knowing how to
make her polemical points lightly
and without fuss. One of the most
sensation. Kenneth Tynan wrote:
“Miss Delaney brings real people
on to her stage, joking and fl aring
and scuffl ing and, eventually, out
of the zest for life she gives them,
surviving.” Not everyone agreed.
Salford’s council felt the city’s image
had been trashed and the Spectator
went into snobbish overdrive,
arguing that it was “the inside story
of a savage culture observed by a
genuine cannibal”.
The cannibal had the shrewdest
sense of who she was and of
prejudice at large. “Usually North
Country people are shown as
gormless,” she wrote, “whereas in
actual fact they are very alive and
cynical.” She – and her characters –
lived up to this description. Looking
out from the Manchester fl at, Helen
says with almost camp sarcasm:
“There’s a lovely view of the
gasworks, we share a bathroom withBooks
Days in the life of
theatre’s neglected
working-class hero
Shelagh Delaney was 19 when
she sent A Taste of Honey to
that powerhouse of the stage,
theatre director Joan Littlewood ,
disingenuously presenting herself
as a northern ingenue or, as the
historian Selina Todd puts it: “1958’s
answer to Eliza Doolittle.” Delaney
claimed to know nothing about
the theatre. She was being thrifty
with the truth but her play, set in
working-class Salford where she
grew up, did the talking: her voice
was funny, serious and rang true.
Todd describes Delaney as the fi rst
post war playwright to show that
women “had minds and desires of
their own... a radical proposal in
the 50s”. She argues that, “moreKate Kellaway welcomes
a powerful biography of
Salford-born dramatist
Shelagh Delaney, whose
trailblazing debut play
shed light on the desires
of ordinary women in
grimy 1950s Britain
Biography
Tastes of Honey
Selina Todd
Chatto, £18.99 , pp277What a formidable
ally Todd makes –
all the more
powerful for
knowing how to
make her polemical
points lightly
shaming things she homes in on
is the extent to which working-
class women writers in the theatre
today have to raise their voices
more loudly to be heard than their
middle-class counterparts.
A Taste of Honey is set in a
“comfortless fl at” in Manchester.
It opens on Helen, “a semi-
whore”, and her daughter, Jo. The
astonishing thing is all the ways in
which the dialogue has not dated. It
reads almost as freshly as if it had
just been written (if you overlook
Helen’s opinion that spaghetti is
new fangled). The women’s repartee
about men is buoyantly acerbic –
the art of the smart retort alive and
frisking. Marriage is the inescapable,
intermittently despised, subject:
“We’re all at the steering wheel
of our own destinies,” says Helen,
“careering along like drunken
drivers. I’m going to get married.”
She marries one of her punters, a
younger man. Unmarried Jo gets
pregnant by a Nigerian sailor (there
is no racial “theme” – he is black
because he is black, simple as that).
And once he has vanished, a gay
lodger offers to help Jo with the
baby. The play is also remarkable
for its time in being an affectionate
sketch of a gay man fi nding his path,
alongside an unconventional young
woman fi nding hers.
When A Taste of Honey opened
at the Theatre Royal Stratford
East in May 1958 , it caused a