A Taste of Honey

Review by: Paul Towers, 22/10/19

A Taste of Honey by Shelagh Delaney

A National Theatre production directed by Bijan Sheibani

Curve 22 – 26 October 2019

“still very relevant today”

Surprisingly Shelagh Delaney wrote her first play, A Taste of Honey, in 1958 at the age of just 19. Right up until her death in 2011 her output was prodigious encompassing stage, film, TV and radio. However nothing really outshone her debut and it is still very relevant today even though it sometimes suffers from being lumped in with the Angry Young Men and kitchen sink dramas of the period.

The current production, while still set ‘up north’ is firmly based in Salford in the 50’s. Poverty and deprivation abound and Helen (Jodie Prenger making a welcome return to Leicester’s Curve) is a blousy single mother with a very erratic sense of parenting; her daughter Jo (Gemma Dobson) fights with her tooth and nail and, at 18, repeats her mother’s mistake and gets pregnant with a sweet talking black sailor, Jimmie (Durone Stokes) who subsequently abandons her. Her salvation is gay friend Geoffrey (Stuart Thompson making his professional theatre debut) who sees her through her pregnancy despite the abuse heaped on him by Helen’s boyfriend Peter (Tom Varey). The script is scattered with racism and homophobia as was prevalent at the time.

Prenger, as expected, grabs her role of the dissolute mother and runs with it, tearing up the scenery when needed and proving she is way more than the musical theatre star we all know.

The script highlights the abject poverty so many lived in at the time but it is laced with lots of laughs. Some of the lines are almost Wildean.

Director Bijan Sheibani has taken a creative decision to put a live musical trio of piano, bass and drums onstage and these provide the backing for the various scene changes which are creatively choreographed in a half light. Every time a new character was introduced they sang a bit of a song which defined the character.

The set was an appropriately gloomy, moody, grey jumble of pillars and walls. As virtually all the action takes place within the cockroach infested flat it just needs the furniture to be moved around to suggest the passing of time.

A Taste Of Honey is at Curve until Saturday 26^th October and then continues to tour until it hits London at Christmas. Details at https://tinyurl.com/y53hjnt5

Curve http://curveonline.co.uk
First published on Western Gazette