Shelagh Delaney, the playwright, who died on Sunday aged 71, wrote – at the age of 17 – A Taste of Honey (1958), which was to place her at the heart of what became known as the kitchen sink movement in Britain's post-war dramatic revival.
Prompted by her contempt for traditional, decorous West End drawing room dramas about the love lives of well-bred people, Shelagh Delaney spent a fortnight furiously writing a play of such arresting, authentic and seedy social realism that it became one of the most influential works of its generation.
Set in a grimy industrial Lancashire lodging house, the action centres on a gawky, adolescent schoolgirl who is preparing to have a child by a black sailor who promptly abandons her. Other characters include the girl's tarty, devil-may-care mother and her sleazy lover, as well as a gentle, homosexual art student who befriends the girl during the pregnancy.
Staged in distinctive, semi-music hall style by the radical and controversial director Joan Littlewood, of the Theatre Workshop at Stratford, east London, the play created a stir with its strident honesty, emotional integrity, exuberant humour and touches of poetry.
It opened at Stratford just three weeks after John Gielgud's production of Terence Rattigan's Variation On A Theme arrived in the West End. The latter play, about a much-married elegant socialite and a young ballet dancer, had been witnessed by Delaney during its tour of the provinces, driving her to compose A Taste of Honey. The theatrical clash could hardly have been greater.
"Two styles of theatre were at war across London," observed Rattigan's biographer Geoffrey Wansell. "And there was little doubt who would win." Within four months, Variation On A Theme had closed at the Globe, while the following February A Taste Of Honey opened at Wyndham's.
After transferring to the West End and then to Broadway it became, in 1962, a successful film directed by Tony Richardson, with Rita Tushingham as the girl, Dora Bryan as the mother and Murray Melvin as the motherly art student, a part he also played on stage.
What gave A Taste of Honey its theatrical impact was Littlewood's dynamic staging and Shelagh Delaney's sympathetic view of her working-class characters and their predicaments.
Coming from the pen of a Lancashire shop girl who had left school at 16, the play's matter-of-fact defiance of social and sexual convention, its open-minded attitude to racial miscegenation, and its acceptance of the prospect, for unmarried women, of a life without men, were as refreshing and bracing as John Osborne's Look Back in Anger had been two years earlier.
But A Taste of Honey was free of Osborne's rage and rebelliousness. Apart from its sexual politics, the play evoked human relationships with warmth and humour, providing an invigorating contrast to its gloomy theme; the heroine seems to accept the surrounding squalor: "I really do live at the same time as myself, don't I?"
Why Shelagh Delaney, considered the most promising playwright of her time, never wrote anything else of comparable importance for the stage was a mystery. A second play, The Lion in Love (1960), also dealt with an unhappy family, this time composed of market-stall traders. The play again portrayed the relationship between a daughter and her wayward – this time drunken rather than promiscuous – mother, but the daughter was more mature and the mother more central to the play's interest. While not without quality, it was not a notable success.
None the less she remained – at 22 – feted by the public and by the critics. "Surely no dramatist can ever have got farther on a smaller body of work," noted the critic John Russell Taylor.
Shelagh Delaney was born on November 25 1939 into a working-class family in the northern industrial town of Salford, near Manchester. On failing her 11-plus she went to Broughton Secondary School and, while there was talk of her being moved to a grammar school, she left at 16 with no special qualifications.
It was during a stint with an engineering firm that she visited a Manchester theatre to see Variations on a Theme, starring Margaret Leighton. If that was drama, Delaney decided, she could do better herself. She set about A Taste of Honey and sent it to Littlewood, who accepted it for production. After the usual Theatre Workshop process of adaptation and elaboration with the inclusion into its lively northern idiom of nursery rhymes, songs, rhythmical repetitions, jazz and vaudeville gags, the author was summoned to attend a late rehearsal at the Theatre Royal, Stratford, where she failed to notice any changes to the text until they were pointed out.
A Taste of Honey had two separate runs in the East End of London, in 1958 and 1959, before it transferred to Wyndham's for 350 performances. It was celebrated as the epitome of kitchen-sink dramaturgy 10 years before the abolition of official stage censorship. While it won critical respect, Littlewood's jaunty style of musical staging was not universally accepted.
Lindsay Anderson, writing in Encore magazine, called it "a work of complete, exhilarating originality. A real escape from the middlebrow, middle-class vacuum of the West End." To The Spectator's Alan Brien, though, it was no more than "a boozed, exaggerated, late-night anecdote of a play which slithers unsteadily between truth and fantasy, between farce and tragedy, between aphrodisiac and emetic. Each character swells into focus through a different distorting lens.
"The play is written," Brien added, "as if it were a film script with an adolescent contempt for logic or form or practicability upon a stage, and Miss Joan Littlewood has produced it with the knockabout inconsequence of an old-fashioned Living Newspaper tract."
After The Lion in Love, Shelagh Delaney turned to writing scripts for film and television. These included the adaptation of A Taste of Honey for Tony Richardson's film; Albert Finney's Charlie Bubbles, about a writer who learns that professional success is no consolation for a failed emotional life; and Mike Newell's Dance With A Stranger about Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain.
Among other film credits were The White Bus (1966) for Lindsay Anderson; Winter House (1986); and Love Lessons (1987), from the book by Joan Wyndham. Television credits included Did Your Nanny Come From Bergen? (1970); St Martin's Summer (1974); The House That Jack Built (1977); and Find Me First (1979). The House That Jack Built, adapted from several of her television playlets, was staged on Broadway in 1979.
She also wrote a novel – Sweetly Sings The Donkey (1964) and several radio plays.
Shelagh Delaney had a daughter, who survives her.
Shelagh Delaney, born November 25 1939, died November 20 2011
What gave A Taste of Honey its theatrical impact was Littlewood's dynamic staging and Shelagh Delaney's sympathetic view of her working-class characters and their predicaments.
Coming from the pen of a Lancashire shop girl who had left school at 16, the play's matter-of-fact defiance of social and sexual convention, its open-minded attitude to racial miscegenation, and its acceptance of the prospect, for unmarried women, of a life without men, were as refreshing and bracing as John Osborne's Look Back in Anger had been two years earlier.
But A Taste of Honey was free of Osborne's rage and rebelliousness. Apart from its sexual politics, the play evoked human relationships with warmth and humour, providing an invigorating contrast to its gloomy theme; the heroine seems to accept the surrounding squalor: "I really do live at the same time as myself, don't I?"
Why Shelagh Delaney, considered the most promising playwright of her time, never wrote anything else of comparable importance for the stage was a mystery. A second play, The Lion in Love (1960), also dealt with an unhappy family, this time composed of market-stall traders. The play again portrayed the relationship between a daughter and her wayward – this time drunken rather than promiscuous – mother, but the daughter was more mature and the mother more central to the play's interest. While not without quality, it was not a notable success.
None the less she remained – at 22 – feted by the public and by the critics. "Surely no dramatist can ever have got farther on a smaller body of work," noted the critic John Russell Taylor.
Shelagh Delaney was born on November 25 1939 into a working-class family in the northern industrial town of Salford, near Manchester. On failing her 11-plus she went to Broughton Secondary School and, while there was talk of her being moved to a grammar school, she left at 16 with no special qualifications.
It was during a stint with an engineering firm that she visited a Manchester theatre to see Variations on a Theme, starring Margaret Leighton. If that was drama, Delaney decided, she could do better herself. She set about A Taste of Honey and sent it to Littlewood, who accepted it for production. After the usual Theatre Workshop process of adaptation and elaboration with the inclusion into its lively northern idiom of nursery rhymes, songs, rhythmical repetitions, jazz and vaudeville gags, the author was summoned to attend a late rehearsal at the Theatre Royal, Stratford, where she failed to notice any changes to the text until they were pointed out.
A Taste of Honey had two separate runs in the East End of London, in 1958 and 1959, before it transferred to Wyndham's for 350 performances. It was celebrated as the epitome of kitchen-sink dramaturgy 10 years before the abolition of official stage censorship. While it won critical respect, Littlewood's jaunty style of musical staging was not universally accepted.
Lindsay Anderson, writing in Encore magazine, called it "a work of complete, exhilarating originality. A real escape from the middlebrow, middle-class vacuum of the West End." To The Spectator's Alan Brien, though, it was no more than "a boozed, exaggerated, late-night anecdote of a play which slithers unsteadily between truth and fantasy, between farce and tragedy, between aphrodisiac and emetic. Each character swells into focus through a different distorting lens.
"The play is written," Brien added, "as if it were a film script with an adolescent contempt for logic or form or practicability upon a stage, and Miss Joan Littlewood has produced it with the knockabout inconsequence of an old-fashioned Living Newspaper tract."
After The Lion in Love, Shelagh Delaney turned to writing scripts for film and television. These included the adaptation of A Taste of Honey for Tony Richardson's film; Albert Finney's Charlie Bubbles, about a writer who learns that professional success is no consolation for a failed emotional life; and Mike Newell's Dance With A Stranger about Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain.
Among other film credits were The White Bus (1966) for Lindsay Anderson; Winter House (1986); and Love Lessons (1987), from the book by Joan Wyndham. Television credits included Did Your Nanny Come From Bergen? (1970); St Martin's Summer (1974); The House That Jack Built (1977); and Find Me First (1979). The House That Jack Built, adapted from several of her television playlets, was staged on Broadway in 1979.
She also wrote a novel – Sweetly Sings The Donkey (1964) and several radio plays.
Shelagh Delaney had a daughter, who survives her.
Shelagh Delaney, born November 25 1939, died November 20 2011
