Where to enter the world of Shelagh Delaney? How to avoid cliché, attack the ordinary and defy convention? If I hadn’t been born with such an intensive dislike of ‘puns’ it would all be so easy. But there is an elephant in the room, as the saying goes, and one has either to embrace or to banish it.
I’m talking, of course, about Morrissey.
And, there, I’ve done it already. In one instance I have succumbed to writing the name of a singer no reviewer can let alone when talking about A Taste of Honey.
‘Shelagh Takes Another Bow,’ ran the headline in The Observer when Clare Brennan reviewed the recent Royal Exchange Theatre production of Delaney’s influential play. Alfred Hickling proclaimed in The Guardian that the ‘introverted, sexually confused’ character of Geoff paved the way for Smiths fans of later decades, thus proving the two Manchester writers ‘really were hand in glove.’
Every review, it seems, tends towards some Morrissey link or other. November’s press cuttings, from the most national of broadsheets to the most regional of rags, were awash with Smithsian witticisms. Then again, I suppose this is hardly surprising seeing as Morrissey has openly championed Delaney’s work for more than twenty years. So, why does this incessant wordplay anger me so?
You’ll probably hate me when I explain. My reasons are immature, desperate, overly-protective, and sound something like this -
Morrissey and Delaney belong to me.
Not literally, of course, and I am aware that a sentence such as the one written above is something you’d more likely stumble across in the psychotic scribblings of Kevin Spacey in Se7en than at the heart of an amateur theatre review. But, ridiculously, it rings true.
There is something very personal about exploring The Smiths’ back catalogue and, consequently, digging out obscure lyrical references to cultural texts such as A Taste of Honey. Like sex in the play, Smiths records belong behind a closed bedroom door, to be played when there’s nobody else around. Each loaded verse is secretive, intimate, glorious, and to see those lyrics turned into miserable newspaper puns is scandalous. There are two words for people like me (though I am sure, by now, you will have conjured one or two more) and every so often one hears the disgust and the repulsion in a person’s voice when they announce: ‘Oh, you’re a Smiths fan…’ And can tell, by the curve of the lips and the venomous tone, that they believe all Smiths fans to be hopeless, impotent, self-righteous, unlovable miserablists with a penchant for the past. Who know? They might be right.
But what of the play? Inexcusably, I fear I may struggle tonight: I’m not really a ‘reviewer’ and I tend not to appreciate the role of the critic. (What’s that old saying about thinking you know the way?) Nevertheless, I’ll do me best.
Shelagh Delaney’s name is synonymous with a very distinct, very authentic Northern rhetoric. She is arguably the first working-class female playwright – a true-to-life Salfordian with an inherent grasp of the red-bricked language of poverty. It was a delight, therefore, for me - a Midlander, who has no real sense of regional identity, and whose affinity has always been with the North - to find myself in 2008:
a) living in Manchester
b) working in Salford
c) watching a stage production of A Taste of Honey for the first time
The first striking feature of Jo Combes’s production is the DJ. Up on the balcony, thinly veiled by a rectangular billboard advert, Jon Winstanley soundtracks the play with a host of Manchester’s finest groups: The Stone Roses, Oasis, Joy Division, even the Ting Tings. It is a valiant effort to distinguish this version as unique to its countless revivals, and on paper it looks like a cracking idea. Unfortunately it all seems a little too forced and, honestly, such modernism confuses what the costumes, props and stage-set combine to convince us of – namely, that this is 1950s England.
A thousand curses upon me for starting so negatively. I told you I’d struggle. Let’s do the Good Stuff instead.
A Taste of Honey is, primarily, about a Salfordian mother and her daughter. We are introduced to Helen and Jo while they are in the process of moving into a cold, rundown flat next to the gasworks. Poor, lacking opportunity, but nonetheless brash, Helen soothes her ills with booze, caring very little for her daughter’s well-being. As a way of getting out of the gutter, she agrees to marry a wealthy younger man – much to the annoyance of Jo. What follows is a vivid portrayal of sex, poverty, teenage pregnancy and abandonment in a Salford tenement.
I first met Jo – the anguished teenager who falls pregnant to a black sailor - at university, during a lecture on 1960s kitchen-sink cinema. The scene we were shown (which, if I recall, mentions Salford Town Hall) was that in which Jo, frustrated and depressed, is given a baby doll by Geoff, the gay art student on whom she has come to depend.
‘It’s the wrong colour!’ She exclaims, and throws the doll away.
Thankfully, none of this drama is lost in translation to the Royal Exchange stage. Jodie McNee is captivating as Jo. She is witty, abrasive and endearing, and the superior, standoffish manner in which she deals with her mother is perfectly realised.
Equally convincing is Sally Lindsay’s portrayal of tarty, self-assured Helen: gone instantly is one’s pre-performance familiarity with Coronation Street’s warm- hearted Shelley Unwin. Indeed, Lindsay has been cleverly cast as Jo’s near-alcoholic mother. It is an instance of great sadness and human tenderness when Helen explains to Jo: ‘I never thought about you. Never have done when I’m happy.’
But happy she is not, and her relationship with the seedy, eye-patch-wearing Peter (finely played by Paul Popplewell) is always destined not to last. Still, it doesn’t stop her from leaving (thus forcing a vulnerable Jo to fend for herself) as soon as she finds out Jimmie (Marcel McCalla) - the man her daughter slept with – is black. Delaney handles such flashes of petty racism with a clever hand, and at times it is difficult not to wonder how many of these prejudices the young playwright experienced herself.
This stage interpretation highlight appears, however, to be Geoffrey – or, rather, Adam Gillen, who is wonderful. Aside from the audience’s moans of pity and sympathy, Gillen places his emphases in all the right places and, in doing so, ensures his oft-disputed character does not become a caricature. Gillen appears from nowhere just before the interval, bursting onto the stage with a red balloon in hand during a full-cast Smiths dance-along, an embodiment of the kind of imagery Morrissey employed in pop videos such as ‘Ask’ during the mid-eighties.
Indeed, it is this pre-interval choreography - in which the audience is treated to ‘Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now’ in its entirety - that really makes Combes’s production shine. So explosive is its celebratory air that, quite foolishly, one is almost able to envisage a future in which everything might just turn out alright for Helen and Jo. Arguably, this is never meant to be, and we can only presume that Helen’s final re-emergence in her daughter’s life will prove to be as grimly disappointing as ever.
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