Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey is a play about a working-class schoolgirl's dysfunctional relationship with her mother. First staged in 1958, the play is a pioneering work in the British cultural movement known as kitchen sink realism.
The play opens with seventeen-year-old Jo and her forty-year-old mother, Helen (described in the stage directions as a "semi-whore") moving into a rundown flat in a Manchester lodging house. Helen and Jo's adversarial relationship is made clear as the two bicker over the shabbiness of the place and the fact they are always living in similarly dire conditions. Jo outlines a plan to leave school at Christmas and start earning her own money to live independently. Helen's younger lover, Peter, a flashy car salesman, arrives unexpectedly, having tracked down Helen. He proposes marriage, but Helen won't commit. Helen comments on Jo's jealousy at seeing her mother show affection to anyone but her. Jo soon becomes engaged to her boyfriend, Jimmie, a Black sailor in the Navy, and they make plans to marry on his next leave in six months. Helen also reveals that she is marrying Peter and moving in with him, which provokes Jo's resentment. More than six months later, Jimmie hasn't returned as promised and Jo is pregnant. Jo befriends Geoffrey, whom she believes is a closeted homosexual, and he moves in to help her with the baby. Believing Jo needs her mother's support, Geoffrey contacts Helen, who hasn't been told about the pregnancy. Helen shames Jo but also offers to send money every week. Sometime later, Helen barges back into the flat, having been kicked out by Peter. Although Jo is about to go into labor, Helen makes Geoffrey leave the flat. After pushing Geoffrey out, Helen learns from Jo that her baby will be Black. Helen makes insensitive and racist comments about not knowing what to do with such a daughter or grandchild, and then leaves to drink. The play ends with Jo, unaware that Geoffrey has also left, smiling to herself as she watches her mother abandon her yet again.
Exploring themes of codependency, poverty, resentment, shame, alcoholism, abandonment, and pride, A Taste of Honey highlights and questions social tensions having to do with class, race, gender, and sexual orientation in postwar Britain. Despite the play's serious subject matter, a comedic tone prevails with characters who are full of energy and wit.
Written by Delaney when she was only nineteen, A Taste of Honey garnered immediate critical acclaim. Delaney co-wrote a cinematic adaptation of the same name that was released in 1961. Over the decades, A Taste of Honey has been professionally staged several times.
