to Mother’ movement?”

A savage quarrel between Jo and Helen nearly leads to blows, but Geof intervenes. Peter arrives, very drunk, abuses Geof, swears at Helen and insults Jo. Helen realizes that she must choose between him and Jo; she offers to stay, but Jo rebuffs her. She goes off with Peter.

In the next scene, it is nearly time for the baby’s birth. Jo is frightened about the future and asks Geof to hold her hand. They banter affectionately, and Jo blurts out her fear that she has inherited her father’s madness. Geof comforts her and gently teases her for letting this prey on her mind, telling her it was probably a figment of Helen’s imagination.

He gives her a life-sized doll for motherhood practice, but she throws it on the floor, declaring that it is the wrong color. Geof offers to go and look for The Boy, but Jo knows that the affair is over—it belongs to her fantasy world.

Just as they are becoming very warm and close, Helen returns, loaded with baggage; Peter has left her and she is clearly back for good. She takes charge of everything, cleans the flat although she knows Geof has just done it, and brings out lots of new baby clothes, which Jo refuses to look at. While Jo is offstage, Helen orders Geof to leave. Sadly, he decides that there is no room for both of them and that he must be the one to go.

Alone with Helen, who seems to have become a “proper” mother, Jo feels soothed. When Helen learns that the baby might be black, however, she is outraged, and Jo tells her that if she does not like it she can leave. Helen goes out for a drink, but she will be back. Jo, alone on the stage, although missing Geof badly, smiles a little to herself, and sings a nursery rhyme to cherish his memory.

The structure of A Taste of Honey is circular; it begins and ends with mother and daughter locked together in a relationship that satisfies neither. In between, the episodic form gives the effect of a series of vaudeville sketches. The dialogue indeed has the snappy give-and-take of the music-hall, but although funny on the surface, underneath it is raw with pain.

Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop, which first presented the play, set the style for its production: a cross between naturalistic comedy and stylized melodrama. Scene changes and progress of time are marked by lighting fade-outs and fade-ins. The setting is quite simple. The players dance onto the stage, often carrying their own props, and dance off according to their moods, accompanied by music from an onstage jazz trio. The trio also accompanies the snatches of song which crop up from time to time.

The players sometimes address their remarks directly to the audience. When Helen, in the first scene, sings a song, she talks to the musicians, and critics have noted the strong impact when, in the final scene, she turns to the audience and asks, “What would you do?” At the very end, when Jo leans against the doorpost to sing a nursery rhyme, she sings directly to the audience, reminding them, as well as herself, of the taste of honey she enjoyed with Geof—a memory that will have to carry her through the difficult time ahead.

Through a series of loosely related episodes, A Taste of Honey follows its teenage, working-class protagonist through the process of her entry into womanhood. As the play begins, Jo and her mother, Helen, have just moved into their latest dwelling, a dingy hole in a lower-class neighborhood that leaves Jo suitably unimpressed. Moving from place to place is an old story for these two, but it seems to Jo that they are moving down in the world and from a position that was hardly exalted. Helen refuses to be discouraged; the place will do, if only because it has to do. The arrival of Peter terminates the tentative stability of Jo and Helen’s arrangement. An old friend of Helen, he wants to renew their relationship. When he proposes marriage, Helen shows an interest that catches her daughter’s sometimes-caustic attention.

Responding both to her desires as a young woman and to her mother’s apparent indifference, Jo becomes involved with a young black seaman. She fantasizes that he is an African prince; in fact, he is from Cardiff, Wales. Wherever he is from, Jo finds him impossible to resist, even though she probably at least half realizes that the ring he gives her does not commit him to any permanent relationship. He must return to his ship, and Helen’s impending marriage to Peter means that Jo will be alone. Before leaving, Helen tells Jo, whether truthfully or not, that Jo’s father was a retarded man with whom Helen had an affair shortly after her marriage to her puritanical first husband.

At the beginning of the second act, Jo is visibly pregnant. Her young man is nowhere in evidence, and Jo, although she still alludes to the fantasy that he is an African prince, wastes little time in regretting his departure. She has been befriended by Geoffrey, a gay art student. Fortuitously, he is looking for a place to stay. In offering him the use of the couch, Jo assures herself of a nurturing companion in what could otherwise have been a bitterly lonely time. Noticing some sketches Jo has done, Geof acknowledges her undeveloped talent. The talent is likely to remain undeveloped, since setting a goal and working toward it are not congenial to Jo’s temperament. She is no planner, whether the issue is art or motherhood.

Geof’s concern for Jo leads him to go surreptitiously in search of Helen. Jo does not want her mother to play any role in this part of her life, and she is a bit angry with Geof for his interference. She dismisses Helen’s suggestion that Jo might come and live with her and Peter, and it turns out that Peter is unwilling to have Jo and her baby anyway. Impatiently, he tells Helen to come along with him. Jo is not surprised that Helen does what Peter says.

Yet Helen has not gone for good. When she turns up again, it is because Peter has moved on to another woman. Helen now asserts her prerogatives as mother. She, not Geof, will look after Jo; in fact, Geof had better move out entirely. Neither Jo nor Geof can resist Helen’s force. Now alone with Helen, Jo tells her mother that the baby will be black. Helen’s first reaction is to say that in that case she will drown it, but as she leaves for the drink she decides she needs, she offers another idea. Perhaps they can put the child on the stage and call it Blackbird. Alone at the final curtain, Jo sings a song that Geof has taught her.

*Salford

*Salford. Town adjacent to Manchester in the industrial Midlands district of England that is the setting for the play and the place in which playwright Shelagh Delaney was born and grew up. The location is identified in a prefatory page of the published text; however, the play’s opening stage directions place its location “in Manchester.” Having been the center of England’s textile industry since the fourteenth century, Manchester is also the country’s most densely populated area, though not its largest city. Containing many Port of Manchester docks, Salford became part of the new metropolitan county of Greater Manchester in 1974. Factories dominate the urban landscape, and its population is predominantly working class.

Helen and Jo’s flat

Helen and Jo’s flat. Described in Delaney’s stage directions as “comfortless,” the semifurnished apartment that Helen, an alcoholic “semi-whore,” has rented for herself and her teenage daughter, Jo, is the latest in a series of such rooms that they have occupied, each cheaper and tawdrier than the one before. It has only one bed, and Helen acknowledges that “everything in it’s falling apart . . . 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.” The stage set also includes a portion of the street outside the apartment building, where Jo’s boyfriend, “a coloured naval rating,” proposes marriage to her.

Jo notes that fifty thousand people live in tenements near the cemetery and a slaughterhouse. Scenes of such urban squalor had rarely been depicted realistically on the English stage before this play. They were in stark contrast to the middle-and upper-class elegance of then-popular plays by Noel Coward and others. This flat is considerably worse than the apartment in John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, another working-class drama that premiered in 1956 and was also set in the English Midlands. Like the readers of Émile Zola’s novels more than six decades earlier, London theatergoers were shocked but also intrigued by the urban naturalism of Delaney’s setting, her lower-class characters, and the grim events that transpire among them.

At the time of the first production of A Taste of Honey, the talk of the English theater was of the work of the “Angry Young Men,” who were rejecting the genteel conventions of the English stage in favor of a new directness of emotion and of social and political protest. In this context, it was Shelagh Delaney’s considerable accomplishment to shift the focus of attention to women. Delaney not only situates the mother-daughter bond at the center of the play but also examines that bond with an honesty and an absence of moralism that remain impressive. Moreover, she allows the women to control the action. Although not goal-oriented in the manner of the conventional male hero, they are the active forces in the play.

The playwright was not the only creative artist involved in the evolution of A Taste of Honey as a theater work. The play’s original director, Joan Littlewood, as founder of the Theatre Workshop, was a major figure in the advanced British theater at the time. She made a number of significant contributions, including the characters’ direct addresses to the audience (sometimes called “breaking the fourth wall”), that complicate the play’s realism without violating it. Littlewood’s importance in the theater may be equal to that of any British playwright of her generation, and A Taste of Honey takes on added importance as a collaboration of women in the theater.

The success of her first play created for its remarkably young playwright great expectations that were not fulfilled in the years that followed. A Taste of Honey remained its author’s one theatrical success. Yet in defining new possibilities for women in theater, A Taste of Honey constitutes at least a significant forerunner to a woman’s theater. Jo and Helen must be numbered among the great roles for women in the English theater of the twentieth century.

In the mid- to late-1950s, England was still grappling with the aftermath of World War II. The bombing of London, known as the "Blitz," commenced on September 7, 1940, and persisted throughout the war. Children were evacuated to the countryside for safety, and women in their twenties became eligible for the draft. Rationing of food, fuel, and other essentials was commonplace during the war. By 1944, Germany's secret weapon, the V2 ballistic missile, began targeting London, worsening the devastation caused by earlier bombings. When the war concluded, American soldiers returned to a homeland that had experienced minimal damage within its borders.

In contrast, Britain had suffered extensive damage and faced a lengthy rebuilding process. Rationing continued long after the war ended. People needed housing and buildings for work, worship, and recreation. Reconstructing Britain's intangible assets would also take considerable time. The war had heightened feelings of loyalty and betrayal, innocence and corruption, commitment and abandonment. The Blitz's aftermath and the Holocaust's horrific images deeply affected the British, but their endurance and survival strengthened their resolve to reclaim their way of life.

In America, the hardships of the Great Depression and World War II gave way to the postwar boom of the 1950s. For the most part, the 1950s were economically prosperous, except for minorities, particularly black Americans. However, this prosperity was not mirrored in England, where a significant portion of the population relied on relief, the British government's form of welfare. There was widespread despair about the future, and society seemed harsh and mechanistic, especially in the industrial heartland. This sense of despair was reflected in the literature of the late 1950s. A group of young writers from this period was labeled the "Angry Young Men" because their works were filled with protest, bitterness, and anger at the prevailing social values in Britain.

Authors like John Osborne, Kingsley Amis (Lucky Jim [1954]), Alan Sillitoe (Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner [1960]), and John Braine (Room at the Top [1957]) introduced the antihero as the protagonist in their works. These antiheroes were young individuals who recognized that the upper classes had no intention of sharing their wealth or helping the lower classes succeed. Osborne and his contemporaries viewed the upper classes and their established institutions with disdain. Delaney was considered part of this group when A Taste of Honey was produced, though her focus was more on creating realistic characters than advocating for social change.

For the first time, the working class was gaining a voice in England's literary scene. These new writers were not emerging from Britain's upper echelons or the refined South. This fresh wave of authors had an intimate understanding of the working class and questioned, "what is real?" Their answer was that for most Britons, reality consisted of poverty, dead-end jobs, and the struggle for basic survival. While postwar life quickly returned to normal for the upper classes, conditions for workers did not improve. As a victorious nation, England should have seen prosperity across all its classes, yet only a small minority were reaping the benefits during this time.

English laborers could look to America and see the middle class thriving, chasing the "American Dream." Jobs were abundant, and wages were rising. Workers were purchasing cars, homes, and furniture to fill them. But in England, the future seemed bleak unless the working class found a voice. The dramas and novels of protest advocating for social changes provided this voice. Despite Delaney’s claims that she was not part of the Angry Theatre, her play nonetheless highlighted the struggles of the lower classes.

Angry Young Men
The term "Angry Young Men" was coined for a group of British writers in the late 1950s, with playwright John Osborne as a prominent figure. Their works conveyed a sense of bitterness and disillusionment with postwar British society. A notable characteristic of their writing is the antihero—a flawed, often abrasive character who rebels against a corrupt social order while striving for personal integrity. Although Delaney did not aim to join this group, critics perceived her play as a protest against working-class poverty and the despair induced by a social system that restricted people based on status or class.

Delaney’s play contains elements of the "Angry Theatre," particularly its working-class setting. However, her characters lack motivation. Neither Jo, Helen, nor Geof exhibit any desire to change the world or address the injustices they face. Unlike Jimmy Porter in Osborne's Look Back in Anger, Delaney’s characters let life pass them by without seeking change or rebelling against their adverse situations. Delaney often stated that her goal was to portray the working class with realism, not to be part of the Angry Theatre movement.

Audience
The audience comprises the people for whom a drama is performed. Authors typically write with an audience in mind; however, Delaney is said to have written for actors, believing they had limited opportunities in contemporary productions. An intriguing aspect of A Taste of Honey is that Delaney often has her characters address the audience directly. This technique allows actors to more fully develop their characterizations, engaging in a form of faux dialogue with the audience. It also enabled the original audiences—many of whom had little exposure to the social classes depicted in the play—to interact more closely with the working class.

Character
A character is a person in a dramatic work, and their actions drive the story. Character can also refer to an individual’s morality. Characters can range from simple stereotypes to complex, multi-dimensional figures. They may be defined by personality traits, such as a rogue or a damsel in distress. "Characterization" is the process of creating a lifelike person from an author’s imagination. To achieve this, the author gives the character personality traits that define who they are and how they will act in various situations.

Genre
Genres categorize literature. The term "genre" is French for "kind" or "type." It can refer to categories like tragedy, comedy, epic, poetry, or pastoral, as well as modern forms like drama, novels, or short stories. It also encompasses types of literature such as mystery, science fiction, comedy, or romance. A Taste of Honey is typically classified as a realist, modern drama.

Plot
The term "plot" refers to the sequence of events in a story. Typically, plots should include a beginning, a middle, and an end. However, they can also consist of a series of episodes that are thematically connected, a technique often used by German playwright Bertolt Brecht. Essentially, the plot allows the author to delve into central themes. In A Taste of Honey, the plot revolves around Jo's journey to cope with her mother's abandonment and her quest to find the strength to endure. The play's theme focuses on the intricacies of the mother-daughter relationship.

Setting
The setting refers to the time, place, and cultural context in which the play's action unfolds. Elements of the setting can include geographic location, physical or psychological environments, dominant cultural attitudes, or the historical period of the action. In A Taste of Honey, the setting is a dilapidated flat in a poor neighborhood. The events take place over nine to ten months, roughly the duration of Jo's pregnancy.

1958: Colin Clark, an English Roman Catholic economist, denounces birth control. He argues that while population growth challenges agrarian societies, it also drives advancements in industry, commerce, political leadership, and science.

Today: Birth control remains a hotly debated topic, with protests against abortion often marked by violence, including murders and bombings.

1958: Agatha Christie's Mousetrap becomes the longest-running play in British history, surpassing 2000 performances. Terrance Rattigan’s Variations on a Theme, which premiered on May 8, is noted for inspiring Delaney to write A Taste of Honey due to its perceived lack of substance.

Today: Both Mousetrap and A Taste of Honey continue to be staged in regional theatres, while Variations on a Theme has faded into obscurity.

1958: The Clean Air Act, enacted in 1956, comes into effect. This legislation marks Britain's effort to reduce deaths in London and other industrial cities caused by factory emissions and coal-burning pollution.

Today: Although cars still contribute to pollution, coal-burning has significantly decreased. Britain continues to clean public buildings, which for years have been coated in soot from coal combustion.

1958: For the first time, the British government permits women to sit in the House of Lords.

Today: With Margaret Thatcher having served as Prime Minister for several years, women in Britain's Parliament are now a common presence and no longer considered unusual.

A Taste of Honey was transformed into a film in 1961, achieving widespread popularity and garnering several critical accolades. The movie features performances by Rita Tushingham, Robert Stephens, Dora Bryan, Murray Melvin, and Paul Danquah. Tony Richardson directed the film and co-wrote the screenplay with Delaney.

Sources
Aston, Frank. Review of A Taste of Honey in the New York World Telegram, October 5, 1960.

Barnes, Clive. Review of A Taste of Honey in the New York Post, May 6, 1981.

Beaufort, John. Review of A Taste of Honey in the Christian Science Monitor, May 6, 1981.

Boles, William. “‘Have I Ever Laid Claims to Being a Proper Mother?’ The Stigma of Maternity in Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey” in Text and Presentation, Vol. 17, 1996, pp. 1-5.

Chapman, John. Review of A Taste of Honey in the Daily News, October 5, 1960.

Coleman, Robert. Review of A Taste of Honey in the New York Mirror, October 5, 1960.

Kalem, T. E. Review of A Taste of Honey in Time, July 6, 1982.

Kerr, Walter. Review of A Taste of Honey in the New York Herald Tribune, October 5, 1960.

Kroll, Jack. Review of A Taste of Honey in Newsweek, July 20, 1981.

McClain, John. Review of A Taste of Honey in the New York Journal American, October 5, 1960.

Rich, Frank. Review of A Taste of Honey in the New York Times, April 29, 1981.

Taubman, Howard. “Theatre without Illusion” in the New York Times, October 5, 1960.

Taylor, John Russell. “Way Down East: Shelagh Delaney” in The Angry Theatre: New British Drama, revised edition, Hill and Wang, 1969, pp. 117-40.

Watt, Douglas. Review of A Taste of Honey in the Daily News, April 29, 1981.

Watts Jr., Richard. Review of A Taste of Honey in the New York Post, October 5, 1960.

Whitehead, Susan. “Shelagh Delaney” in Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography, Vol. 7: Writers after World War II, 1945-1960, Gale, 1991.

Further Reading
Campbell, Louise. Coventry Cathedral: Art and Architecture in Postwar Britain, Clarendon Press, 1996. This book, while focusing on a single building, explores how its construction reflects many significant Postwar ideas and trends in architecture during the 1950s and 1960s in England and Europe.

Ellis, Peter Berresford. A History of the Irish Working Class, Pluto Press, 1996. This book delves into the economic, political, and social factors that have shaped the working class in Ireland.

Jones, Gareth Stedman. Language of Class, Cambridge University Press, 1984. This compilation of essays by a British social historian examines the nature of class consciousness and key issues affecting Britain’s working class.

Taylor, John Russell. The Angry Theatre: New British Drama, Hill and Wang, 1969. This book includes biographies of playwrights along with discussions of their individual works.

Throop, Elizabeth A. Net Curtains and Closed Doors: Intimacy, Family, and Public Life in Dublin, Bergin & Garvey, 1999. This book explores family life in Dublin and the influences of religion, society, and English colonialism.