REVIEW- VOLUNTARY PLAYS

A TASTE OF HONEY

Shelagh Delaney began writing A Taste of Honey as a novel but then she
decided to change it and publish it as a play when she was nineteen years
old so it was first performed in 1958 and it was her only successful play of
the time.

A Taste of Honey is very realistic play because the characters are working
class people who live in cramped and poor flats and it deals with the
different issues that were relevant at that time but nobody wanted to
represent them on stage. It portrays many crucial issues of society such as
homosexuality in the character of Geoff, the teenage pregnancy, the single
motherhood and responsibility of having and carrying for a baby at the age
of seventeen years old and also it talks about racism.
When I read this play I could see a lot of discrimination and oppression
toward black and homosexual persons, we can see this marginalization
toward those people and this homophobic attitude in the character of
Helen.

The most striking thing for me about this play is that there is no
sentimentality , there is this hate-love relationship between the mother
(Helen) and the daughter (Jo), they try to support each other as a “normal
family” but sometimes they have a lot of disagreements and fights. Which is
interesting is that Delaney breaks this structure of being a traditional family
at that time: Helen is a parent who always put herself first and she can
abandon her daughter Jo in any unpleasant situation as she does when she
realizes that Jo is going to have a black baby and this type of moments in the
play forces Jo to be more independent.

The style of the play is extreme naturalistic, the words used in the play such
as “daft” and “spiv” make the play more realistic because it uses a colloquial
language that makes people understand better the play. It is fascinating to
see some innovations in A Taste of Honey because it is the first time we see
a relationship between two women as a protagonists and a play that deals
with the real social issues of society, especially if it is a play written by a
woman in that time.

Karina Savinova