Theater: It Won't Do, Luv

The Lion in Love, by Shelagh Delaney. When a dispossessed class finds its voice, its proudest possession is its tongue. Everyone must be told—and told off—about how it feels to be an economic, or a racial, or a social, outcast. In A Taste of Honey, Britain's Shelagh Delaney, then a semiliterate 18-year-old, gave tongue richly and scathingly to her bitterly impoverished girlhood in industrial Lancashire. Out of her background, she dramatically distilled a kind of urban folk poetry, humor and wisdom, and in a candidly observed relationship between a shiftless mother and a rebel daughter added fresh scenes to the...