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A Taste of Honey (by Shelagh Delaney) was written, out of dissatisfaction with seeing flaccid plays, by a 19-year-old Lancashire girl. By the time she was 21 it had run for a year in London's West End, as it deserved to. For a playwright of 19, A Taste of Honey is a most talented piece of work.
Actually a deeper dissatisfaction than trivial plays had inspired it: a dissatisfaction with the shabby world that Shelagh Delaney knew at first hand, and a sense of blockaded lives. It is a dissatisfaction that very often leaps to life through words that have edge and ring true, among people who are disturbed but vital, in scenes where lives come together, or clash, or come apart. An illegitimate young girl lives with her tramp of a mother, who soon enough runs off with a man. The girl herself has a brief affair with a Negro sailor on leave, becomes pregnant, is cared for by a young homosexual who moves in with her, and at the end is left alone to have her baby.
What is most rewarding and least nine-teenish about A Taste of Honey is its un-histrionic realism, which blinks at nothing but can be wry as well as harsh, can use sunlight to make soot the more visible, and can blend a knack for theater with a sense of truth. With its misfits and misfortunes, all too much of the play could have turned sentimental; only here and there is it a little so. Even more, it could have turned sensational, but bold black words like Illegitimacy and Homosexuality and Miscegenation boil down into what is in the world and what happens in life, and indeed the girl's touching, not unthorny relationship with the homosexual is the best thing in the play. Nor does A Taste of Honey shout its protest, which is as much social as economic, and aimed less at the system than the Establishment.
Where Honey falls short is where its method falls short—in a lack of intensifi cation and fusion. The play is episodic, without all the episodes being equally good; it is for the most part closeups, without all the characters being equally real (the mother is not always seen in focus and is played by Angela Lansbury too much for farce). But if there is a want of art to A Taste of Honey, there is equally a want of contrivance, and Joan Plowright's brilliant portrayal of the girl raises the play at its best from gifted 19 to full maturity.