Shelagh Delaney was nineteen years old when she wrote "A Taste of Honey," and the only thing that puzzles me is why she hasn't written the Divine Comedy and the collected works of Henry Fielding since. She was a talented nineteen.

She was also a very understanding nineteen. Her intention, she reports in a program note …, was simply to "write as people talk." But that isn't what she's done at all. As a matter of fact, her people talk most strangely. For all that they are empty-headed chatterboxes slaving out an existence in a cheap attic "with a lovely view of the gasworks" alongside a "river the color of lead," they rap out words and phrases that now and then suggest they've all been given an aborted college education….

And there must be few people in the world with such nonstop tongues, ready with a whole new, slam-bang sentence before the gasping and garrulous fellow or girl in the opposite corner has managed to spit out the words, flying like tracer-bullets, that constitute the sentence before that. This is more like a funny and bitter and outraged soundtrack being played at excess speed than it is like speech. Leaves you breathless. Miss Delaney does.

All in the interests of accomplishing a great deal more than she suggests. What is really interesting about "A Taste of Honey" is the social, psychological and moral strip-tease Miss Delaney performs. She has ripped from the backs of her clattering and loveless Lancashire people every last vestige of the claims to character and the pretensions to dignity most of us expect of the species.

Affection is gone….

Patience is gone, kindness is gone, the forms of adult civilization have flown the coop in this industrial trash-heap: nothing is truer, more telling, or—if you want to get right down to it—more attractive than the spectacle of [the daughter] clouting a worthless visitor on the head with a box and subsequently kicking him with the vigor of a flatfooted child. These are people living hand-to-mouth and making a bad meal of it, revolving with intense animation in a world from which form, shape, and all standards have vanished. When the male 'big sister' who is nursing the lass through her pregnancy mutters, "It's simple—you live and you die," our fiery-eyed heroine will have none of it. "It's not simple," she snorts. "It's chaos."

What the chaos makes clear is that when every hope, along with every support, has been peeled away, there is still something endearing left…. [Our] interest is not centered on [the girl's] sorrows. It is riveted to the restless and inexplicable gayety that overtakes her as she swings backward from a flight of rickety stairs like a clockwork doll, and to the droll, frisky tease she becomes as she takes a floor-mop to her pliant male-nurse….

"A Taste of Honey" doesn't taste like honey, it tastes like vinegar spiced with ginger. It will not, I should add, be to every one's taste, and it may very likely add fuel to the fear that the contemporary theater is obsessed with the dingy. Even so, despair is not in it. It is fresh in its accents, funny in its perceptions, somehow wistful beneath the caterwauling.

And oh my goodness, it is talented.