Review of A Taste Of Honey at Royal Exchange, Manchester.
“Golden lads and girls all must, As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.”
At times, director Emma Baggott’s sure-footed revival of A Taste of Honey feels as if it is summoning up the ghosts of Shelagh Delaney’s Salford. In its opening moments, Nishla Smith’s stylish jazz singer coaxes light from a threadbare lampshade with the warmth of her voice – illuminating a seemingly abandoned space and revealing a shabby, sparsely-furnished bedsit.
Even once Jo and her mother Helen have spilled noisily into their new accommodation, Smith’s character remains at the margins. Constantly there, yet not visible to those on stage – her presence and voice haunt events.
Delaney’s unsparing portrait of Salford life may have caused outrage within certain sections of the city back when it premiered in 1958, but her play continues to be popular locally – serving as inspiration for several songs (and record sleeves) from The Smiths in the 1980s, and encouragement for a new generation of playwrights.
Mindful perhaps of that enduring affection for Delaney and her most celebrated play, beyond the addition of Nishla Smith’s ethereal songstress, Baggott’s A Taste of Honey remains at its core a very faithful staging of the main story.
A moth-eaten chaise-longue, folded-down formica table, and lumpy-looking bed must pass for home comforts. Designer Peter Butler’s wooden carousel-like structure ebbs and flows over head – and you sense this is just one more stop on a merry-go-round of moonlight flits for Jo and Helen. Their bags and cases are ever-present, never far from reach.
Both women seem restless, on pins – Helen with vague plans for a fresh start, and Jo unsure of where her life is heading.
In her professional stage debut, Salford-born Rowan Robinson shines as Jo. Moody and rebellious, yet also somehow awkward and vulnerable, Robinson’s Jo is wonderfully knotty.
Draping a jade green scarf around the bare light bulb of the new flat, and accompanied by a suitcase filled with sparkly Christmas decorations, Jo hasn’t yet given in to grim reality.
In her big red duffle coat, floppy knitted beret, and school uniform she still retains a child-like quality. When she first meets Geoffrey, a gay young man (played beautifully by David Moorst), at a fair – they skip around as if in a playground, with a balloon and big teddy bear in tow.
Yet Robinson also shows there is pain lurking within Jo – her wide eyes brimming with tears, as she stares fearfully into her future as a single mother.
Delaney’s play feels ground-breaking in its foregrounding of two working-class women, and their relationship is pivotal. The characters (and accompanying performances) of mother and daughter feed off one another as Robinson’s Jo and Jill Halfpenny’s Helen verbally prod and poke, back and forward, provoking reactions.
Both seem to rely on attack as a form of defence. Helen is especially battle-hardened, and ready for whatever life throws at her. She dresses for an audience, and her clothes – fitted, eye-catching and colourful – are her armour.
Halfpenny skilfully shows that Helen’s getting-by comes at a cost, allowing glimpses of the “wear and tear on (her) soul”. Returning to her daughter after another failed relationship, with clouds of smog snapping at her ankles, there’s a tiredness in her step, a temporary fraying at the edges.
Delaney’s writing determinedly highlights Jo’s potential, and its likely fate. Although there is something of the moody teenager in her frustration at having to share a bedroom with her mother, Jo’s wish for “a room of my own” explicitly echoes Virginia Woolf’s championing of dedicated space for a woman’s creative fulfilment.
Unfortunately you fear that any hopes and dreams Jo may be harbouring are destined to go the way of the bulbs that she scavenged from the local park to bring colour to a window box – discovered months later beneath the sofa, lifeless and shrivelled up from neglect.
“The whole city smells”, someone says of 1950s Salford, and the place the women call home is served up unvarnished. Working-class life is never romanticised. Characters can be brutal to one another, there is prejudice and casual cruelty, and some of the attitudes of the time feel like a slap in the face.
Yet there is much in the play that will still resonate with a modern audience – precarious living, resourceful women, careless men, and Jo and Geoffrey’s attempt to establish a ‘chosen family’.
There’s not an ounce of rose-tinted nostalgia in Baggott’s staging. Even the jazz singer’s smooth as silk vocals, accompanied by Alexandra Faye Braithwaite’s spiky skeletal arrangements (and drawing on words from Ewan MacColl, I Am Kloot, and Shakespeare), seem designed to stir up unsettling emotions.
Simisola Majekodunmi’s striking lighting design will often conjure up a sense of somewhere just beyond the harsh glare of that bedsit – warm and glowing invitingly, but also illusory and out-of-reach.
The production’s imaginative framing gifts the play an additional dream-like quality. In particular, the jazz singer’s ambiguous presence creates a sense of dislocation. Is she looking back over time, remembering? Or, somehow observing from beyond the confines of this place?
Her distanced, almost spectral, gaze seems to emphasise that for all the grit and vitality of Delaney’s characters, and the vividness of their lives, there is a fragility to them – and they will succumb to the ravages of time, just as the streets they inhabit will be swept aside by a wrecking ball.
Delaney’s play ends on a note of uncertainty, but Baggott’s atmospheric and affecting production offers a fleeting moment of hope – as Jo, who is afraid of the dark, finds the strength within to light up the night sky.
Performance seen on 25 March 2023.
A Taste Of Honey runs at Royal Exchange from 20 March to 13 April 2023.
Images by Johan Persson.
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