A Taste Of Honey

Description

A Taste of Honey became a sensational theatrical success when first produced in London by Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop company. It was made into a highly acclaimed film in 1961. The play is about the adolescent Jo and her relationships with those about her - her irresponsible, roving mother Helen and her mum's newly acquired drunken husband, the black sailor who leaves her pregnant and Geoffrey the homosexual art student who moves in to help with the baby. It is also about Jo's unshakeable optimism throughout her trials.This story of a mother and daughter relationship (imitated in other British plays since) set in working class Manchester continues to enthral new generations of readers and audiences. Now established as a modern classic, this comic and poignant play by a then nineteen-year-old working-class Lancashire girl was praised at its London premiere in 1958 by Graham Greene as having "all the freshness of Mr Osborne's Look Back in Anger and a greater maturity."

Shelagh Delaney was born in Salford, Lancashire. She is most well-known for A Taste of Honey, for which she won the Foyle's New Play Award and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. She wrote the screenplay for the film version with Tony Richardson and was awarded the British Film Academy Award and the Robert Flaherty Award. Her other screenplays include The White Bus and Charley Bubbles, for which she won the Writers Guild Award. She has also written for television and radio and has had a collection of short stories published.

Some of Delaney's themes may feel dated but her writing still glitters dangerously and wittily. A Taste of Honey remains a passionate statement about real people trapped in poverty, deprived of ambition and vulnerable to manipulation by the fickleness of others. * Independent, (19 November 2008) * Brawling, boozing, teenage pregnancy and fractured families: Shelagh Delaney's benchmark drama, first staged by Joan Littlewood in London in 1958, has lost none of its relevance 50 years on... The quirkiness and passion of Delaney's young voice still rings out... It remains passionate and pungent. * The Times, (19 November 2008) * Its raw eloquence, sometimes almost lyrical, its tough, swaggering humour...its frank brutality and unblinking humanity. * Sunday Times, (23 November 2008) * Delaney's achievement was to write, with comic vividness, about the world she knew . . . the tone is often raucously comic, and the final message is of the human spirit's capacity for survival. -- Michael Billington * Guardian * The inimitability of a classic ... A Taste of Honey hits the sweet spot all over again. -- Dominic Maxwell * The Times * Delaney's play was not just wise and accomplished for a girl of eighteen. It is wise and accomplished, full stop. -- Laura Thompson * Telegraph * The real genius of Delaney's work is in how it anticipates the future realities of late 20th-century Britain ... themes which have yet to be fully accepted by society. -- Jonathan Brown * Independent *