In 1961, A Taste of Honey was made into a film starring Rita Tushingham and Dora Bryan, with Shelagh co-writing the screenplay. People flocked to the theatre and the play was a success, transferring to the West End and then to Broadway, where it starred Joan Plowright and Angela Lansbury as Jo and Helen. Shelagh herself said in an interview that the most rewarding feedback, in her opinion, came from “people off the street” rather than the critics. “There is plenty of time for her to worry over words like ‘form’, which mean something, and concepts like ‘vulgarity’ which don’t… She is 19 years old and a portent.” “Miss Delaney… is too busy recording the wonder of life as she lives it,” Tynan’s review continued, in a swipe at dismissive critics. The Times described A Taste of Honey as “tough,” “humorous” and “exhilarating,” while The Observer’s Kenneth Tynan was full of praise: “Miss Delaney brings real people on to her stage, joking and flaring and scuffling and eventually, out of the zest for life she gives them, surviving. He concluded: “If there is anything worse than an Angry Young Man it’s an Angry Young Woman.” The Daily Mail‘s critic thought that the play tasted not of honey but “of exercise books and marmalade” and that its “similarities to real drama are quite accidental”. Some London critics were unsure of what to make of this gritty depiction of northern working-class life, portrayed without sentimentality or mawkishness. In the theatre programme, director Joan Littlewood described Shelagh as “the antithesis of London’s Angry Young Men. The play rocked the establishment in 1958. Would characters such as Elsie Tanner have been portrayed on television if Helen hadn’t already conquered the stage? Corrie creator Tony Warren was in the audience at Stratford East, and it is easy to see the play’s influence on the soap. Years before Coronation Street was broadcast on TV screens across the country, the play turned domesticity into art. “It’s falling apart, it’s true, and we’ve no heating, but there’s a lovely view of the gasworks, we share a bathroom with the community and this wallpaper’s contemporary,” asks Helen, in a wry pastiche of all that was meant to matter to women in the 1950s. The two women’s circumstances are not what they would have chosen. While men come and go, women remain the cornerstone.

Its premise was startlingly original in 1958, focusing on the lives of two working class women and addressing issues including sex and sexuality, motherhood and domestic struggles.Ĭaught between the ‘keep calm and carry on’ cheery stoicism of the 1940s and the sexual revolution of the 1960s, the central characters of teenager Jo and her single mother Helen openly resent the poverty of Salford’s slums but they are never martyrs. The play had, in fact, been longer in the making, Shelagh later revealed, having started life as a novel. But “a young man, anxious to improve my mind, took me to the Opera House in Manchester and I came away after the performance having suddenly realised that at last, after nineteen years of life, I had discovered something that meant more to me than myself.” Sally Lindsay in A Taste Of Honey, Royal Exchange Theatre, 2008 “A fortnight ago I didn’t know the theatre existed,” she wrote in her covering letter. She sent it off to Joan Littlewood, the avant garde director of Theatre Workshop, whom Shelagh described as “the most valuable person I’ve ever met.” From her terraced house on Ducy Row in Pendleton, Shelagh, the daughter of a bus conductor, wrote about the world she saw around her.ĭrawing on the gritty reality of working class northern life, Shelagh completed the manuscript in under a fortnight while on leave from her job as a photographer’s assistant at Metropolitan-Vickers electrical engineering company. Having been to Manchester’s Opera House to see Variations on a Theme by Terence Rattigan, she believed she could do better. On, Shelagh Delaney’s debut play A Taste of Honey premiered at Theatre Royal, Stratford East.Ī down-to-earth and moving story of a teenage girl’s pregnancy following a one-night stand with a black sailor, and her bond with the gay art student who moves into her flat, it would become one of the defining feminist plays of the 1950s and pioneered the “kitchen sink” realism movement of the late 1950s and 1960s.Ħ0 years later its legacy is still with us, its cultural impact apparent across the decades in everything from Coronation Street to The Smiths.īorn in Salford, Shelagh was just 19 years old when she wrote the play.

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