Reading Order
A Taste of Honey Reading Order
A Taste of Honey (1958) by Shelagh Delaney is one of the most remarkable debut plays in British theatrical history — written when Delaney was eighteen years old after she saw a Terence Rattigan play at the Manchester Library Theatre and decided she could write something better. Jo is a young working-class girl in Salford; her mother Helen abandons her to move in with a new boyfriend; Jo has an affair with a Black sailor named Jimmy, who leaves; Jo becomes pregnant; a young gay man named Geof moves in and helps her through the pregnancy. The play is extraordinary not just for its age but for its combination of authentic working-class voice (Delaney grew up in Salford and wrote what she knew), its matter-of-fact treatment of race and homosexuality (both of which are treated as ordinary facts rather than problems), and its refusal of the angry young man's posture of rage: Jo is not angry, she is resilient, and the play is organized around her capacity to form genuine relationships despite everything.
Where to start
A Taste of Honey (1958) — the complete text. Shelagh Delaney's only major work; companion plays include Look Back in Anger by Osborne, Roots by Wesker, and the plays of Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop.
Complete A Taste of Honey Book List
- 1Buy
A Taste of Honey
Shelagh Delaney·1958·The complete play — Jo, Helen, Jimmy, Geof, and the baby. One of the most extraordinary debut plays in British theater; the first production was at the Theatre Royal Stratford East by Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop in 1958 - 2Buy
Look Back in Anger
John Osborne·1956·The companion in the British working-class drama tradition — Jimmy Porter's rage in the cramped Midlands flat. The companion play of the same period and tradition, but organized around the opposite of Jo: where Jimmy is consumed by rage, Jo is defined by resilience - 3Buy
Roots
Arnold Wesker·1959·The companion in the British working-class drama tradition — Beatie Bryant returning from London to her Norfolk farming family. The companion play organized around the same class awakening from a female perspective: both Jo and Beatie are working-class women trying to understand the world they are in - 4Buy
Cathy Come Home
Jeremy Sandford·1966·Sandford's companion BBC television play about Cathy and Reg — a young working-class couple who lose their home. The companion work in the British social-realist tradition organized around the same subject: what happens to working-class women and children when the support systems fail? - 5Buy
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
Alan Sillitoe·1958·Sillitoe's companion novel in the working-class tradition — Arthur Seaton at the lathe and on the weekends. The companion prose work: an investigation of the same class world from a male perspective, organized around the same social landscape that A Taste of Honey inhabits - 6Buy
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner
Alan Sillitoe·1959·Sillitoe's companion short story collection — Smith at the Borstal. The companion investigation of working-class experience and the institutions that try to manage it: Smith's refusal to win the race is the companion act of resistance to Jo's refusal to be ashamed - 7Buy
Up the Junction
Nell Dunn·1963·Nell Dunn's companion sketches of working-class women in Battersea — the women at the factory, in the pub, in the back-street abortionist's. The companion prose work organized around the same subject as A Taste of Honey: the lives of working-class women in Britain in the early 1960s, with the same matter-of-fact treatment of sex, pregnancy, and poverty - 8Buy
Poor Cow
Nell Dunn·1967·Nell Dunn's companion novel about Joy — a young working-class woman in London who cycles through one situation after another. The companion investigation of working-class female resilience: Joy and Jo are companion figures, both organized around the capacity to keep going in the face of circumstances that do not improve
A Taste of Honey — Frequently Asked Questions
Who wrote A Taste of Honey?
A Taste of Honey was written by Shelagh Delaney, who was eighteen years old when she wrote it. Delaney was born in Salford, Lancashire, and left school at sixteen to take various jobs; she wrote A Taste of Honey after seeing a Terence Rattigan play at the Manchester Library Theatre and deciding she could write something better. The play was produced by Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop at the Theatre Royal Stratford East in 1958, transferred to the West End, and was made into a film by Tony Richardson in 1961 starring Rita Tushingham as Jo. Delaney wrote one more play (The Lion in Love, 1960), several screenplays (including Charley Bubbles with Albert Finney), and television work, but A Taste of Honey remains her best-known work.
What is A Taste of Honey about?
A Taste of Honey is about Jo — a young working-class girl in Salford — and the year in which her mother abandons her, she has an affair with a Black sailor who gets her pregnant and leaves, and a young gay man named Geof moves in to help her. The play is not organized around any of these events as a crisis or scandal; it treats them as ordinary facts of a certain kind of working-class life. Its subject is really Jo's capacity for forming genuine relationships despite everything: with Geof, who is the most caring person in the play; with her baby, whom she approaches with complicated feelings; and with her mother Helen, who returns in the last act. The play's tone — comic, unsentimental, resilient — is its most characteristic quality.
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