A Taste of Honey

Synopsis

Jo hasn’t had it easy, growing up with a volatile, alcoholic mother, moving from one bed-sit to another. Until Jo meets Jimmie, a black sailor, who she spends the night with while her mum is gallivanting with a younger man. Jo finds out she is pregnant, and with her mother abandoning her, seeks solace with a homosexual friend, Geoffrey, who becomes a leading father figure to Jo. But when Jo’s mother reappears, the life that she has so carefully put together for herself starts to fall away again. A Taste of Honey was Shelagh Delaney's first play written when she was 19 years old. The first London production in 1958, won her great critical acclaim and popular success. Two years later Delaney received the Drama Critics' Circle Award for the plays New York City production. It was made into a notable film in 1961. A Taste of Honey was voted joint 50th of the National Theatre's top 100 plays of the millennium.

Our Review:

Sophie Bush - 30 October 2012

An on-stage Jazz Trio (Emma Correlle, Geoff Chalmers and Joann Kerrigan) lend an air of excitement to the opening of Sheffield Theatre's revival of Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey. Unfortunately, this is a theatricality missing from the kitchen-sink realism of the production as a whole. The songs that Delaney has curiously imbedded in her text - perhaps suggesting a Music Hall ambiance - have been subsumed almost apologetically into the narrative of Polly Findlay's production; the actors acknowledge the musicians rarely, and the audience never. The team work hard to create Delaney's world, but forget to invite us in.

Katie West certainly has the energy and intensity needed for the play's central character Jo; a tour de force part, never absent from the stage. Yet one comes to relish her rare quieter moments for the variety and respite they bring to the frantic pace and noise of the performance. Eva Pope provides a strong and striking counterpoint, a...

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