In 1958 A Taste of Honey opened at Theatre Royal Stratford East by the skin of its teeth. The lord chamberlain had grudgingly passed the play for performance only because it showed “such a sad collection of undesirables that it can’t do much harm”. It told the story of a teenage girl, her promiscuous mother, her drunk stepfather, a black sailor who gets her pregnant and her gay art student friend who helps with the baby. Kenneth Tynan loved it, the Spectator thought it “awful, amateurish” and the people of Salford, where it was set, worried what the neighbours would think.
The author, 19-year-old Shelagh Delaney, had written the piece in a creative fever following a visit with workmates to see Terence Rattigan’s latest play at Manchester Opera House. Rattigan’s well-tailored drawing room drama didn’t make Delaney angry, she said later, but it did make her laugh, and not in a good way. “Convinced I could do better”, she “just went home and started work”. Within a fortnight she had produced a ragged playscript that skidded all over the place yet radiated a defiant sense of its right to exist. In this version of post-industrial northern England, characters shout, swear, say unforgivable things to each other and don’t see why on earth they should bother being grateful. The women in particular were a revelation. Helen and Jo don’t hanker after a nice suburban council house, a nice office job or even a nice husband. Instead they want a “taste of honey”: clothes, jazz clubs, love – for which read sex – on their own terms.
You can see why Joan Littlewood insisted on staging Delaney’s script within weeks of receiving it in the post from Salford. It was two years since John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger had detonated at the Royal Court, demanding that audiences pay attention to characters who had previously only been seen on stage wearing cloth caps, delivering telegrams or doing bits of comic business in front of the curtain during the scene changes. But where was the female equivalent of Osborne’s Jimmy Porter? Where were the uncomfortable girls and tricky women who refused to believe for a moment that they had, in the recent declaration of Harold Macmillan, “never had it so good”? Women who knew that a bigger fridge was not going to put things right when they had been wrong for so long? Where, most importantly, were the mothers and daughters who actually didn’t like each other all that much?
Littlewood’s instincts were, on this occasion, spot on. It was a commercial hit, transferring to the West End and from there to Broadway, and eventually into the multi-Bafta-winning film directed by Tony Richardson. The rightwing press continued to grumble, with the Daily Mail suggesting that the 1944 Education Act was somehow to blame for A Taste of Honey by giving working-class girls like Delaney ideas and a vocabulary above their station. Everyone else, or at least everyone else who had a passing interest in seeing the British theatre represent all kinds of life and experience, remained convinced that something significant had happened. For Delaney herself, the real thrill came not so much from the champagne and the plaudits (although she loved those, too, and would go on loving them until the end of her life in 2011) as from the fact that the East End locals in Stratford – “bricklayers, cleaners” – enjoyed the play. “I knew they meant it and it was much more rewarding to me.”
In this subtle, thoughtful book, Selina Todd sets out to do more than simply retell Delaney’s rags-to-riches story as if the Salford bus driver’s daughter were some kind of lucky Pools winner. Instead Todd argues that Delaney offers a route to rethinking the ways in which women’s lives in the mid-20th century are routinely written up, especially by feminists. The story that usually gets told is a middle-class one. It concerns a generation of women educated at either independent or grammar schools, who were brought up to believe they could do or be anything they wanted. Until, that is, they left university in the late 1960s and discovered that, actually, their options were not much better than those of their stay-at-home mothers. Professional life was overwhelmingly skewed male, and there was never any doubt about whose job it was to make the tea when your husband’s clever friends came round to talk about Gramsci.
None of this, Todd says, applies to Delaney. She “failed” the 11-plus, and didn’t try to behave well unless she felt like it. She read comics as well as Chekhov and never thought for a moment that life was supposed to be remotely fair. She turned down the BBC’s desperate invitation to join their drama department, but was quite happy to turn in scripts for Z-Cars for cash. She enjoyed being Albert Finney’s girlfriend, but preferred living alone. Collective action didn’t interest her, but she hoped people noticed how well she could dance. The point, Todd suggests, is that Delaney is much more than an interesting outlier in the official annals of second-wave feminism. She is, rather, the thing itself, in all its unfathomable complexity.
• Tastes of Honey: The Making of Shelagh Delaney and a Cultural Revolution by Selina Todd is published by Vintage (RRP £18.99) To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 020-3176 3837. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
