Were you minded to pick a moment in A Taste of Honey that highlights the transformation between the Salford (and Greater Manchester) of then and now, you might well find yourself homing in on the protagonist’s flat. Rita Tushingam’s Jo, deserted by her feckless mother Helen, traipses up rusty metal steps in the wake of a landlord to view a ramshackle space that, at least, presents a chance of liberty. Director Tony Richardson must have intended it to come across as the total reverse of aspirational living; a place that most people (particularly those in and around the Manchester of 1961) would have filed at once in the ‘no thanks’ category. With today’s eyes, of course, you can virtually see the estate agent’s blurb from here: spacious and light open-plan studio above characterful former warehouse. Charming staircase. Original features intact. Cue a string of urbane, moneyed clients.
Post-industrial, late-1950s Salford and the North West more generally play a vitally important role in A Taste of Honey. Claustrophobic streets and houses shot in stark, noir-like terms by cinematographer Walter Lassally evoke the confinement and low status of the main characters, Helen (played with uproarious power by Dora Bryan) and her daughter Jo (the previously unknown Tushingham). Yet the film also frequently escapes to places like Stockport Viaduct, where Jo and her friend Geoffrey (the wonderful Murray Melvin) are able to lose themselves, cavort and sing, or a Blackpool in its glorious heyday, with its ice creams and bustle. Location is noticeably more important here than in most of the New Wave films, and serves to underscore one of Delaney’s main messages: that even in difficult circumstances, beauty and joy can be found. The film’s title alludes to this truism, which is also mirrored in the complex central relationship between mother and daughter. Amidst rather miserable conditions, their apparently bitter fighting is at times revealed for what it really is: an expression of love. A Taste of Honey was ground-breaking in a number of ways, one of which was a refusal to define working-class lives sentimentally. It was a resolute riposte to the caricatures of ordinary folk —women in particular— in the contemporary culture. (Even the brave new world of cinematic realism that Delaney inspired would come to be over-reliant on the trope of the Angry Young Man, often at the expense of three-dimensional female characters.)
Aged eighteen, Shelagh Delaney wrote her play in response to the realities of life that she saw around her but which she felt were not represented to a meaningful degree —or were, indeed, actively avoided— in the theatre of the time. A Taste of Honey blew that convention to pieces. Its subject matter must have seemed to audiences like a long parade of taboos: authentic working-class women front and centre; a prominent interracial love affair; single motherhood; parental discontent and rejection; and the unconventional domestic relationship between straight Jo and gay Geoffrey (at a time when homosexuality was illegal in England, and the propaganda-like 1950s notion of the perfect ‘nuclear family’ had taken hold). These themes are still totally current in contemporary drama. What that says about our society is a discussion for another time, but unlike a lot of the New Wave films, a modern re-make of A Taste of Honey would seem to require little updating – excepting, arguably, Jo’s affair with the significantly older Jimmy (Paul Danquah), which results in her pregnancy. This dynamic does not transfer to the current age with the sympathy intended by Delaney, Richardson, and Danquah. The power imbalance created by the age gap – Jo is still in school, after all – would now be seen differently. The character of Jimmy, a Black sailor on shore leave, is mainly deployed by Delaney to expose racism, shown in several forms: downright insult, confusion, fear, and ignorance. They’re all guilty of it, to some extent. Helen’s latest romantic (and, for her, financially motivated) disaster-in-waiting, the brash and unsavoury Peter, is the worst, but Helen herself is not far behind. Nor does Jo get a free pass: she makes discomfiting remarks, at first in jest but then in earnest when terrified by the prospect of becoming trapped in single motherhood like Helen, compounded by the fact that the child will be biracial. While Jo’s horror —such fine work by Tushingham— is multi-faceted and shockingly real, the viewer feels that it is provoked more by fear of others’ condemnation than straightforward prejudice.
The character of Geoffrey is used for similar ends, with racism replaced by homophobia (plus parental jealousy in Helen’s case, even though she has brazenly rejected the conventional motherhood contract), but he also expresses Delaney’s intent to overturn quaint ideas of the perfect home. Given Geoffrey’s and Jo’s palpable happiness with his eventual dual role as surrogate father and mother to the baby, we can only wonder what it means when, with a passivity nothing short of tragic, Jo ultimately rejects him and their little family in favour of the now Peter-less Helen, forcing herself back into her daughter’s life. In the end Delaney has both women, despite or perhaps because of their travails, adhere to the old adage ‘blood is thicker than water.’ For all that the film nonchalantly proposes a new and valiant concept of choosing your own family, the bond between Jo and Helen is so strong that they are finally driven to embrace their dysfunction. A Taste of Honey concludes with this difficult cocktail of rejection and reconciliation, rather than a neatly-tied happy ending. Instead, the hauntingly expressive sparkler that Jo holds up against a Salford night sky feels like a tribute to her mother, but also and primarily herself. Neither character will conform, and both now see each other for the rebels they are, albeit with differing methods of operation. The sparkler also represents Delaney’s work itself: a light for those whose lives don’t run on society’s tramlines.
Shelagh Delaney would have been perfectly aware that her play was a tremendous provocation in the context of the contemporary theatre, but it’s unlikely that she harboured any dreams of its extraordinary longevity. It remains on the school syllabus, while in Salford the somewhat Joycean-sounding ‘Shelagh Delaney Day’ is on the twenty-fifth of November every year. In music, A Taste of Honey can be found on The Beatles’ debut album, the play’s Broadway theme is an instrumental jazz standard, and in The Smiths song This Night Has Opened My Eyes, Morrissey quotes directly from the film’s dialogue. Delaney herself joined the iconic ranks of Smiths cover stars on the 1987 compilation Louder Than Bombs, while Tushingham (albeit in footage from 1964’s brilliant The Leather Boys) floats ethereally throughout the video to Girlfriend In A Coma. It’s no giant leap to suggest that A Taste of Honey probably inspired early Coronation Street. Characters in Ian McEwan’s 2007 novella On Chesil Beach watch the film... the list goes on and on.
As for Salford, it is now home to Media City UK, a colossal mega-development for TV and retail that has effectively pressed delete on any lingering traces of Jo’s canal-side towpath wanderings. Stockport Viaduct, in the film a portal to misted nothingness, is now gleamingly restored and presides benignly over housing developments and an inviting modern microbrewery. Time and the machinations of progress have created a profound shift around here, especially since the 1990s, bestowing a curious patina upon the celluloid landscape of A Taste of Honey. If, to borrow from L. P. Hartley, the past is a foreign country, then Shelagh Delaney’s grime-stained Salford is frankly on a different planet. In other ways, however, rewatching the film reminds us that some things have barely changed at all. Delaney’s refusal to judge remains a beacon of hope, her writing a reminder that choosing to care and understand, today more than ever, can be a radical act.--Neil Jackson
