A Taste of Honey ☆☆☆☆☆
By Shelagh Delaney
Trafalgar Studios
I’ve been obsessed with Shelagh Delaney since I caught the black and white 1960 film version on TV aged fourteen and became enchanted by its tatty Northern camp. There was something about seeing one’s home town depicted in dour black and white and the strong, funny Northern women it depicts felt like precursors of my beloved Coronation Street. Dora Bryan’s Helen and Rita Tushingham’s Jo were inimitable powerhouse performances. As a young man feeling very much like the only gay in the village, Murray Melvin’s Geoffrey touched my heart and panicked my nascent sexuality: is this what I will become?
One of the many strengths of Bijan Sheibani’s enchanting production currently running at the Trafalgar Studios is that it seems not to look at the film for guidance or inspiration at all. In contrast to Tony Richardson’s grim up North cinema verité, this is a full technicolour rendering of the play, full of bawdy life and Vaudevillian humour. Hildegard Bechtler’s gloriously kinetic staging provides a kinetic energy for the actors to play off and the onstage jazz trio, whilst faithful to Joan Littlewood’s inaugural production of 1958, extends that remit to scatter the evening with song.
JODIE PRENGER has a great singing voice, which opens the play and the sets the tone for this bold and engaging production. PRENGER’s Helen takes no prisoners. Curvaceous, hardbitten and totally self-serving, she’s a joy to watch, her comic timing second to none. KATY CLAYTON’s Jo foregrounds the rich dichotomy of the teenager’s extremes of cynicism and naivety, melodrama and blunt honesty. Together, they deliver an intricate portrayal of a deeply troubled relationship.
The lightness of touch is, of course, in the writing itself, and Delaney, as a young working-class Northern female writer was typecast and excluded in ways so subtle it took Jeanette Winterson in 2014 to point out the overt sexism of her treatment by the male-dominated industry. For my money, Delaney was bolder and more innovative than her male contemporaries, mired as they were in middle-class repressions and refusals to call a spade a spade.
Her depiction of a working class young gay man at a time when homosexuality was still illegal in the UK knocks anything by Rattigan or Osbourne into a cocked hat. You just know that she knows these people, these people are her people, and they are complex in a way that belies her youth (she wrote it when she was 18).
Last night I was most impressed by the dramatic structure of the play, the way she tells it like it is and reaches heights of tragic import. She takes working class lives, specifically the lives of working class women, very seriously, foregrounding two stages of female working class experience – teenagehood and middle-aged single motherhood – in a way that no other playwright had done before. It still feels incredibly bold sixty years later and this production gives that boldness its due.
Shelagh Delaney is one of Morrissey’s favourite writers and he seems to be present in the casting of STUART THOMPSON as the fey stitch bitch cum chambermaid Geoffrey, who bears more than a passing resemblance to a young Steven Patrick. The play is littered with lines the Pope of Mope lifted for song lyrics (“I dreamt about you last night/And I fell out of bed twice”, to name but one).
This is a play about serious and profound themes – loneliness, betrayal, societal expectation versus personal freedom – that in the hands of loftier (read, male) names are championed. I’ve always felt there were shades of Samuel Beckett in Helen’s obsession with death and the cruel and pointless brevity of life.
Delaney did all right for a working class Northern girl, but she was as good as if not better than her male contemporaries who did more than all right. It’s time her fearless writing was given due credit, and this fantastic production goes some way to doing that. Try not to miss it.
https://trafalgar-studios.com/ Until February 29th 2020
Review by Jonathan Kemp
Queerguru London Correspondent Jonathan Kemp writes fiction and non-fiction and teaches creative writing at Middlesex University. He is the author of two novels – London Triptych (2010), which won the 2011 Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award, and Ghosting (2015) – and the short-story collection Twentysix. (2011, all published by Myriad Editions). Non-fiction works include The Penetrated Male (2012) and Homotopia?: Gay Identity, Sameness and the Politics of Desire (2015, both Punctum Books).
Labels: 2020, Jonathan Kemp, London Theatre, review
