A Taste of Honey

 

Written in 1958, when first-timer teenage playwright Shelagh Delaney was only eighteen, A Taste of Honey is biting drama, infused with family turmoil, bigotry and black comedy. To fans of The Smiths, Delaney may have only been the model used on the artwork for Louder than Bombs but she was a hero to gladioli-swinging frontman Morrissey, who was inspired by her working-class roots and cutting observations on poverty surrounding  growing up in Salford. It's this eye for recreating this cosily acerbic domesticity which gives the two such an affinity. This often revived modern classic plays Nottingham Arts Theatre this week. 

The play is the story of Jo, a girl barely seventeen, who is treated as a doormat by her promiscuous mother, Helen. When Helen runs off with the seedy, one-eyed Peter, Jo takes up with a black sailor who promises to marry her, before he heads off to seas, leaving her pregnant and alone. Art student Geoffrey moves in, after being asked to leave his lodging for bringing back a boyfriend, and assumes the role of surrogate parent until, misguidedly, he sends for Helen and their unconventional setup unravels. 

As with most plays about anywhere beyond Watford, it's certainly 'grim-up-North', with its angry depiction of harsh working-class life, but the whole script is shot through with melancholy, love and humour, much like The Smiths' back catalogue. The play is one of similarities, generations and family ties; it takes great pains to subtly remind us just how similar Jo and Helen are underneath and that they care too deeply to let the other see that they do, causing them to push the other away. Any final reconciliation is dashed through a combination of homophobia, racism and latent nastiness. 

In this production, however, the performance lacks a real direction, seeming stuck and laboured. Lacking the musical score which accompanied Joan Littlewood's original production, the performance felt bare and the self-conscious theatricality was mishandled - the sharp asides were more pantomime "Oo-Er, Missus" innuendo. Deborah Craddock as Helen and Amy Tutin as Jo are both reasonably compelling when they stick to naturalism, but they fail to draw any greater focus to what Delaney and Littlewood were commenting when they step-out beyond this.  

 

Along with the recent Time and the Conways at Nottingham Playhouse, A Taste of Honey makes a refreshing change to the usual focus on male protagonists. Jimmy, Jo's sailor boyfriend is cut from this adaptation, but both Christopher Collins as Geoffrey, the sympathetic and caring counterpoint bullied out of Jo's flat where he's made a home by the end, and Chris Mercer, as the boorish and sneering drunk Peter, give fine performances. They're also saved from the mishandled, and more difficult, direct address sections given to the leads. 

The direction felt largely underdone - the pace was slow and plodding, the stage action showed us what the lines were telling us and the blocking looked clockwork-like and stiff. There was a lack of any subtext being teased out or the characters having any inner emotions bubbling under. There were numerous tortuous minute-long scene changes in silence, where nothing discernibly changed on stage. Equally, the curtain-raiser of live singing, beautifully performed by Helen Whittle, seemed entirely to miss the point of Littlewood's original incorporation of the jazz trio; acting as a not-so-subtle Brechtian reminder of the theatrical artifice of the evening's entertainment, rather than a musical appetiser. Director Jessica McLean has evidently tried but, for me, it was on this occasion a little wide of the mark.