"Don't Mention Morrissey..." - A Taste of Honey at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester

(originally written for and published by Hive Magazine, November 2008)

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.

The Abandoned Children’s Home

Mike pushed the gate ajar and looked at the others. His heart quickened. The initial excitement – which had rushed through him like a sockful of Rohypnol – had faded quickly, and in its place a collective, fearful nausea now descended. He felt Rosie’s hand brush against his, linger for a moment, then disappear. Cruel lust surged inside, making him confident enough to take three substantial steps forward before again snapping his neck around to make sure they were all still there.

She didn’t look like herself in the darkness. Her hair appeared somehow wilder, her skin more pallid, and the space around her seemed to take on the dark atmosphere of an Alton Towers television advert. Mike shivered and attempted to reassure himself that his senses were merely distorted by the lack of streetlights and the wine they had stolen from Oddbins. Then, clutching a bottle in his right hand and bracing himself, he proceeded into the garden.

“It used to be a children’s home,” James, trailing last, whispered. “But the woman who ran it went a bit mental. The police reckon she killed eleven of them.”
“In one night?” Rosie squeaked.
“In one night,” James confirmed, proudly. “Well, actually, it was over about ten years. But it’s still pretty bad.”

Despite the hammer in his chest, Mike pressed on. He imagined himself the unordained leader – that quiet, brooding hero who did not want the role but who had fatefully and modestly assumed it.

“This is too weird,” Abby slurred, loudly, and the sickly-sweet scent of strong spirit infected the night air.
“I don’t like this either,” Rosie whispered. “I think we should turn back.”
“Don’t worry. We’re almost - ” Mike stopped in front of a large metal sheet which had been inexpertly nailed in place of the back door. His hand tightened on the neck of the bottle.

“Are you sure this is safe?” Rosie stuttered.
“Perfectly,” he replied, unconvincingly, and he pressed his hand against the steel door. Suddenly, from behind them, a tinkerbell of torchlight started to dance in the darkness. Impulsively, he snapped back his hand and twisted towards the light.

“Police!” A voice shouted from the front of the house. “Who’s back there?”

Mike grabbed Rosie – who was shaking violently - and pulled her down into the grass. Tenderly, he pulled the red hood of her coat up over her head so that she was camouflaged by shadow.

“Stop right there! I can see you!” A different voice announced, closer this time.

James - who was by now in the process of trying to throw Abby over the fence into the next garden – froze before the gaze of the officers’ gleeful, sobering flashlights. He turned towards them with his hands raised in surrender, causing Abby to slide gracelessly down the side of the fence into a soiled flowerbed.

“How many of you are there?” the lead officer demanded.
“Four!” James blurted out, and then: “I mean three.” And finally, with little conviction: “One?”

For the first time, Mike noticed how the blue flashing light of the panda car parked out front illuminated the garden in half-second waves. He pulled Rosie close, pressed a silent finger against his lips and stood up. Immediately the flashlight sought him out. It followed his wary steps forward.

“There’s three of us,” he said, taking control. “I’m Mike, he’s James…”
“And the girl in the bushes?”
“Abby.”
“Hiya!” Abby squawked, enthusiastically. “I’m a bit stuck.”
“Is that booze?” the lead officer asked, gesturing to the half-empty bottle in Mike’s hand.
“Yes,” Mike confirmed. “It’s wine.”
“Can you put it on the ground please?” He obliged. The lead officer moved cautiously into the centre of the garden, her flashlight raised so as to pick out Mike’s face. He squinted.
“How old are you?” she asked. Mike stared at her, crimson-cheeked, for what seemed a cliché.
“Thirty-five,” he said. She eyed him suspiciously. “Alright, alright. Thirty-eight.”
“And you?”
“Forty-one,” James admitted.
“I’m only thirty-four,” Abby proclaimed, picking herself up out of the flowerbed and brushing the dirt from her jeans. “Most of my mates reckon I only look about twenty-seven.”

A sudden rustling in the doorway interrupted her, and the second officer scrambled like a bad simile to retrain his torch.

“Who’s that?” He gushed.
“That’s Rosie,” Mike replied, calmly. “My wife.”

The flashlight found her just as she was removing the hood from over her head.

“I take it you all know this is private property,” the lead officer announced. “And that it’s illegal to trespass on it.” She paused to look at them. “I suppose you thought it’d be a bit of fun, did you? Sneaking in… drinking… acting stupid.”
“Yes,” Mike muttered, sheepishly.
“What?”
“Yes,” Mike repeated, louder this time. “I thought it’d be a laugh.”
“But it’s not a laugh is it? Being caught.”

Silence.

“I said: IS IT?”
“No,” the gang chorused, and the garden fell silent again. Mike felt his bottom lip tremble.
“Do your children know where you are tonight?”
“No,” James said. “They think Abby and me are at Mike’s house.”
“Right. And yours?”
“Same. Except ours think we’re at James and Abby’s.”
“Well, maybe I should give them a call; let them know what you’ve really been up to.”

Mike stepped forward, hurriedly.

“I really don’t think that’s necessary, Officer.”
“Oh, don’t you? And I suppose I’m supposed to make a decision based on what you think is necessary.”
“No, I didn’t mean…” He trailed off.
“I’ve a good mind to shove you all in the back of the car and drive you home. See what your kids make of all this.”
“Please don’t,” James pleaded. “They’d go mental.”
“You wouldn’t do it again thought would you?”
“Won’t do it again anyway,” James sobbed. “Honest.”

The lead officer lowered her head in contemplation.

“If I let you off with this, do you promise to go straight home?”

A sea of “yeses” rang out around the group.

“No loitering, no messing about,” she asserted.
“No messing around,” Mike promised.
“Right, on your way,” she said, and James and Abby started hastily for the front of the house. “I’m going to have to confiscate that though,” she added.

Mike stopped, retrieved the wine bottle and handed it over. The officer surveyed the label and grimaced.

“You’re old enough to know better,” she declared.
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“I’m talking about the wine,” she said.
“Oh. My wife took it while the woman wasn’t looking. It was three for a fiver.”
“We really are very sorry,” Rosie added, her cheek now the colour of the red hooded top.
“I’m sure,” said the officer, and she started towards the police car, with her partner trailing behind, leaving just two slender figures alone beneath the broken security lights.

"All Her Books of Terrified Loneliness..."

“All Her Books of Terrified Loneliness…”
a self-indulgent 1,575 words about Charles Bukowski

“Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit.”

For me, it all comes back to that sentence. It is a beautiful construction; the true essence of whichever velvety truth-speaker actually observed that “Language is the universal whore that I must make into a virgin.” The trouble with words is that they have much in common with alcoholic drinks. You have to try all the combinations you possibly can to stop yourself from getting bored. As a writer (if I may be so bold as to presume I know) one is constantly searching for new and invigorating ways in which to present a new angle on a senescent world, ways of making the prose glitter and sparkle and come alive, and – by no means least importantly – ways of elating the poor souls who have come to cast their careful, trusting eyes over the sentences you have produced. Well, Henry Charles Bukowski did all of those things. Not pretentiously, or falsely, but joyously, and with all the unassuming grace of a true visionary.

When Jarvis Cocker, the super-sexual former Pulp frontman and now superiorly-sexual bearded messiah, was hospitalised after falling out of a window in some daft attempt to impress a girl, he decided that looking up, that elevating oneself to the position of “the artist”, was futile and uninteresting. So, bandaged and broken, he started to look down. And there, in the mundane, he identified an alternative beauty.

Suddenly, the loss of a young couple’s virginity in a Sheffield park became sacred – even glorious. Had it not been for that experience (in which, like all sex-obsessed human males, he risked his life – and worse, his dignity – trying to snooker a girl into sleeping with him) we might never have been exposed to the exquisite snapshots of urban romance and decay we now celebrate in songs like “Do You Remember the First Time?” and “Mile End.” I wonder now as I write this, two beers deep on a Friday afternoon, whether Jarvis would cite Bukowski as an influence of any kind. Perhaps not, but what I’m getting to (what I’m slowly and desperately sliding towards through a haze of topped-up intoxication and gushy prose) is that Bukowski – for all the faults and terrors people so often attribute him – was always looking down.

Or, rather, he was looking SIDEWAYS - all around himself and all of the time - at the filth and the squalor and the magnificence of his country and its people. So often in his writing we are treated to the monologues of the barfly, and the piquant portraits of characters and places so few other authors are willing – or, worse, able – to paint.

It is his poetry I care for most dearly. Written predominantly in free verse and often lacking capital letters or punctuation, each poem is a spectacular love letter, a lyrical sensation. One can lose hours, mornings, days getting lost in his numerous printed collections. By degrees he is joyous, touching, misanthropic, alarming – and always fascinating. Of course I have my favourites, those poems to which I return, and will continue to return until I slip beneath the wheels of a metaphorical 86 bus. I keep with me also a collection of his most divine concoctions, those virginal sentences with their immortal symmetry. (I shan’t name them all here – there are too many - but if you want to talk about them afterwards, I’ll be at the bar...)

I risk the fierce reprisal of several friends and colleagues then when I submit that I don’t particularly find much pleasure in the canon of Bukowski novels. Admittedly, I have only read a few of them (“Post Office”, “Factotum”, “Ham on Rye”) and I am certain that, in time, when the inevitable cries of, “You mean you haven’t even read INSERT BOOK TITLE HERE?” have subsided, I will come to be proven cataclysmically wrong. However, it seems I am somewhat incapable of consuming the man’s novels with the same alacrity I do his poetry and short fiction.

It is worth noting that Bukowski began his career solely as a short story writer. Like Edgar Allan Poe and Ernest Hemingway before him, he mastered short fiction’s peculiar form. He collected numerous rejection slips from literary magazines and publishing houses before a piece of his work was accepted. Unsurprisingly, brilliantly, and using a technique that would re-emerge often in his later work (specifically, taking an event from his own life and half-fictionalising it) his first “success” was entitled, “Aftermath of a Lengthy Rejection Slip.” This self-reflection, this investment in writing so touchingly about the blessed plight of the writer, is one of the reasons I love him so.

I was published for the first time in 2008 - two years after leaving university. I struggle to bring to mind even now a sensation which even closely rivals the strange physical excitement that grips the aspiring writer as they read the words, “Congratulations! Your fiction has been accepted for publication in INSERT RIDICULOUS MAGAZINE TITLE HERE.” It is the truest, most unbridled kind of pleasure one can experience. It is recognition: a dangerous affirmation and celebration of the talents you always suspected you might possess but have – contrarily - spent long, excruciating nights and miserable, brooding mornings fearing you most certainly do not.

That cold January, before the acceptance email dropped into my inbox, I read a lot of Bukowski poetry. So much so in fact that the protagonist of my own story, “Rain on Film”, whilst holed up in a fictional American jazz bar (it’s not as terrible as it sounds – honest) is forced to consider his hero:

“He could have, I figure, written the simplest of postcards and still made it infinitely readable.”

Indeed, there is something indestructible in the words Bukowski throws together which conjures a telepathy between poet and reader. It’s what great literature does. It communicates. It entertains and inspires. It never expires.

I have never longed to write like Bukowski (for one, his subject matter is almost entirely at odds with the life I lead); neither have I ever attempted to emulate his literary style. But he’s always there when I do write. Every time I sit down in front of this computer and start typing (often without a clue as to where I’m going to end up) he’s there, sitting in the corner of the bedroom with a bottle of beer, or hanging precariously out of the window in front so that I don’t forget what it is I’m here to do.

Bukowski is the perfect inspiration. At certain times during his life he was writing five or more short stories per week, each of which was dutifully printed (often without a carbon copy), stamped and posted off in pursuit of publication. And this is his greatest gift to writers. To me. Like the old phrase says: the muse will always find you but it needs to find you working. Well, for a writer that “work” is writing – and Bukowski wrote. And wrote. And wrote.

He smoked and got drunk and gambled and womanised but he always wrote. He was ill and hospitalised and when the doctors told him, “One more drink and you’re dead,” he wrote and drank more. Throughout countless menial jobs, throughout happiness and marriage and fatherhood and heartbreak, throughout hangovers and poverty, he wrote.

In “So You Wanna Be a Writer?”, a poem given to me many years ago by a friend and poet who in his purest moments writes with much the same force as the master himself, Bukowski tells us that if it’s in you - and if that “it” is effervescent, restless and beautiful - then it must be channelled onto the page. If on the other hand what you are writing is laboured, tedious, boring or flat, then it isn’t going to amount to much.

“Unless it comes unasked out of your heart and your mind and your mouth and your gut,” he says, “don’t do it.”

If you’re doing it because you want pretty girls to fellate your ego, don’t bother. Or if it’s the money, the fame and the recognition you long for, give up now.

“Don’t be like so many thousands of people who call themselves writers,” he goes on. “Don’t be dull and boring and pretentious.”

It is Bukowski’s informal, immortal advice and you’d be forgiven at first for thinking it was disheartening. But the truth is that we all have history weighing down upon us. Why start a band if you don’t think it’s going to be better than The Smiths? Why write a novel if it’s not going to be better than “To Kill a Mockingbird?” Come to the typewriter, Bukowski says, with anything but apathy. “Unless the sun inside you is burning your gut, don’t do it.”

So whenever I’m in between stories, and the world around me appears gloomy and unforgiving, and when I feel like I can’t write anything but a dull word, I read “So You Wanna Be a Writer?” and a strange comfort settles over me.

Why?

Because -

when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.
there is no other way.

and there never was.