Books by Shelagh Delaney

 

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A Taste of Honey

 

Teenage Jo becomes pregnant by a black sailor and is abandoned by her irresponsible mother Helen, a semi-prostitute who leaves her daughter to go off with a lover. A gay art student, Geof, moves in to help Jo through the pregnancy but must then face an irate Helen when she unexpectedly returns.

Shelagh Delaney's play A Taste of Honey was a sensational success when first performed in London in 1958. Director Lindsay Anderson dubbed the play a work of complete, exhilarating originality, a real escape from the middlebrow, middle-class vacuum of the West End, while Shelagh herself he described as a courageous, sensitive and outspoken person writing real contemporary poetry. The writing in the play was salty and uncompromising to gasping point at times, said the Daily Herald, the treatment 'as unsentimental and refreshing as a cold bath'; renowned theatre critic Kenneth Tynan saw Shelagh as a portent, bringing real people to the stage 'joking and flaring and scuffling and eventually out of the zest for life she gives them, surviving'.

Now recognised as a modern classic, this comic and touching play written by a nineteen-year-old working-class girl from Salford was made into an equally acclaimed film in 1961.

Producers searched long and hard for an 'ugly' girl to play Jo, and the winner was doe-eyed Rita Tushingham, a teenaged actress from Liverpool whose brother had jokingly told her she was ugly enough to respond to the call. The ensuing (X-rated) film, heavily focused on grim reality, leaves a much bleaker impression than the play but the moodily black-and-white movie was a box-office winner and international success, leaving lasting impressions of a strangely beautiful Salford. It became ranked in the series of iconic Sixties films about the lives and loves of the working classes, and has had a powerful effect down the decades. Manchester pop star Morrissey, of The Smiths, was massively influenced by Shelagh's writing: 'the sagging-roof poetry of Shelagh Delaney's rag-and-bone plays says something to me about my life,' he declared. As far as Morrissey was concerned, the film version was 'virtually the only important thing in British film in the 1960s'; he has boasted of being able to recite the script word-for-word, and claimed that at least fifty percent of his reason for writing was down to Shelagh Delaney.