Joan Littlewood was on the verge of giving up in the spring of 1958. Since the end of the war, she and Gerry Raffles had been trying to make a go of the Theatre Workshop, first in Manchester, and then, for the past five years, at the Theatre Royal in Stratford, East London. The company’s survival thus far was something of a miracle, given the absence of either grants or consistent box-office success; the new theatrical explosion of 1956 was slow in spreading to the East End, and even the money Gerry Raffles got from his father would not have kept the ship afloat if it were not for the goodwill of the actors. They survived on starvation wages (when there were wages at all), they slept at the theatre when they couldn’t afford digs, they mucked in with the backstage chores - all this on top of the punishing schedule imposed on them by their director.

Photograph by Robert Day

But few of them would have relinquished their experiences of working with Joan Littlewood - however much she put them through, and however many alterations they were forced to accommodate in order to create work to her high standards. More often than not the ends seemed to justify the means. Richard II was an early critical success, making the headlines when Harry H Corbett opened as Richard on the same night that the Old Vic opened with John Neville in the role. Another triumph was the première of Brendan Behan’s The Quare Fellow, and yet another was the British première of Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children, in which Littlewood, against her will but at the insistence of the Brecht estate, had played the title role herself.

But, excellent though much of the company’s work had been, there had always been a problem with liaising bums and seats. According to Philip Hedley, the former artistic director of the Theatre Royal Stratford East, and an old hand from the early Littlewood days: “The pattern was something like a dozen people every night, maybe 25 to 30 on Friday and if we got 100 on Saturday that was really very very good.”

When, in 1958, an entire season of plays flopped, Littlewood decided to call it a day. However, she chose to make her parting shot with a highly impressive script she had recently received from a Salford teenager called Shelagh Delaney. Miss Delaney, it seemed, had written A Taste of Honey after a bad theatrical experience at Manchester’s Palace Theatre, where she was nearly bored to death by a production of Terence Rattigan’s Variations on a Theme. The idea for A Taste of Honey had been gestating in her brain for a while, though it was initially conceived as a novel. The Rattigan experience changed that.

Photograph by Robert Day

“I’ve found a genius,” Joan Littlewood proclaimed to her old colleague Avis Bunnage, as she tried to interest her in Delaney’s script. But Bunnage was reluctant to do it. She had been growing increasingly tired of Littlewood’s moods; her volatile, bullying manner was alright in the rehearsal room, but of late there had been a number of periods of refusing to talk to her socially. In fact, Bunnage was ‘in Coventry’ yet again when Littlewood broke the silence to offer her the part of Helen. The actress replied that she was not going to play Helen, because she was leaving the theatre. Littlewood retorted: “You must do it, Bun. Let’s keep the Theatre Royal Stratford East open for two weeks, then that’ll be the end of the theatre, Theatre Workshop and the end of Joan Littlewood.”

Few could resist such an offer, and Avis Bunnage was not one of the few. Alongside her were cast Frances Cuka as Josephine, John Bay as Helen’s one-eyed toy boy Peter, Murray Melvin as Geoffrey, and Jimmie Moore as the black sailor who spends Christmas with Josephine and leaves her expecting his baby. And so Joan Littlewood began the period of discussions, improvisations, arguments and analysis that would lead to what she believed (or said she believed) was to be the Theatre Workshop’s last effort.

Like all new plays under the Littlewood regime, A Taste of Honey was subjected to changes through improvisation. In his book, Sacred Monsters, the writer Daniel Farson quotes a comment made by Joan Littlewood when she was directing his play about Marie Lloyd - the conversation was on the subject of Shakespeare, but its implications were much wider: “Bill wasn’t a bad old hack, but we don’t respect him”.

“With Joan you always did improvisations,” says Philip Hedley, “and certain lines you would come out with, it’d be ‘Right, that’s in,’ which happened with The Quare Fellow, Oh! What a Lovely War, everything; ad-libs from the actors at the time of improvisation.” Avis Bunnage recalled instances where “up to 90 per cent of the play would disappear”. Shelagh Delaney was lucky in this respect: according to one story, when she saw a final run-through of the play, she didn’t notice any differences until they were pointed out to her. Avis Bunnage recalled that the playwright was initially disapproving of the changes, “But then she got to like it”.

There has been considerable debate concerning just how much of the performance script was Delaney’s and, indeed, how much of the published script (following the author’s re-corrections) was the Theatre Workshop’s. However, in the course of research for his book, Anger and After, John Russell Taylor compared Delaney’s original typescript with the performed version and judged them to be “not so radically different...The dialogue throughout has been pruned and tightened - rather more, evidently, than is usual in rehearsal - but most of the most celebrated lines are already there... and the character of Jo, the play’s raison d’être, is already completely created and unmistakably the same.”

The improvisation on A Taste of Honey extended, as usual, to backstage tasks. Avis Bunnage: “I found my own costumes, as did most, and we did all our own stage management. Murray Melvin, who was a student, played the boy [Geoff] in it and had to pull the curtain up and down”.

When Murray Melvin raised the curtain on the night of 27 May 1958, he was raising it on a new era for the Theatre Workshop. Instead of being a two-week swansong for the company, A Taste of Honey enjoyed a triumphant six-week run and, before long, a transfer to the West End. The critics enthused in near unison. Lindsay Anderson, with whom Delaney would later collaborate on the short film The White Bus, was among the play’s first champions:

“A work of complete, exhilarating originality... A Taste of Honey is a real escape from the middlebrow, middle-class vacuum
of the West End... Josephine, the plump, untidy schoolgirl who moves into a Salford attic with her flighty mum... learns about
 life the hard way. Her mother goes off again, this time to marry a peculiar, drunken upper-class boy with one eye and a weakness
 for older women. She spends Christmas with a charming Negro sailor, and ends up pregnant. She shares a room with a brisk,
affectionate, vulnerable, queer art student... Pretty well anything could have been made of this material, which is written in vivid,
salty language and presented without regard for conventions of dramatic shape. In fact, so truthful is Miss Delaney, so buoyant
of spirit, and so keenly alive to what is preposterous, vulgar and ruthless in human beings (as well as to what is generous, creative
 and warm), that she makes us forget about judging. We simply respond, as to the experience itself.”

Kenneth Tynan, reviewing the subsequent West End transfer, remarked that, “It deals joyfully with what might, in other hands, have been a tragic situation,” and though he was generally as enthusiastic as Lindsay Anderson there were reservations. “I don’t know that I like all of Miss Littlewood’s production tricks; I don’t see why the mother should address all her lines to the audience, like a vaudeville soloist, and I can’t understand why the original ending, in which she accepted the Negro paternity of her daughter’s baby, has been altered to permit her to make unattractive jokes about piccaninnies and ‘bloody chocolate drops’. All the same, we have here quite a writer, and quite a director.”

As for its political content, most commentators seemed happy to agree that there wasn’t any; “Unlike Jimmy Porter and his followers, Jo is not angry”, John Russell Taylor has affirmed. However, this is not an entirely satisfactory comparison, as Jimmy Porter did little more than pick on his wife and friends from the safety of his own armchair. A Taste of Honey may not have advocated a specific programme of social change, but the play presented black and gay characters without stereotyping long before it was fashionable to do so - at a time, in fact, when resurgent forces of British fascism were stirring up hatred against black immigrants, and when homosexuality was still an imprisonable offence (pending the findings of the 1958 Wolfenden Committee's report).

It was also a time when the Lord Chamberlain still wielded his powers of theatrical censorship, and although the play made it over that particular hurdle, it provoked disapproval in some surprising quarters. Philip Hedley, visiting Australia during 1958, attended a lecture by J B Priestley, normally considered a model of tolerance and liberal sensibility. Yet he was speaking sarcastically in this lecture about A Taste of Honey. He said: “I believe there is a play in London that’s about a girl with a semi-prostitute mother who gets pregnant by a black man and is befriended by a homosexual,” as if it was a ludicrous idea. He said, “And what is this young lady going to write next, I wonder?” Now, of course, it’s a school text.

The Taste of Honey phenomenon lasted for four years. In 1960 it went to Broadway, under the direction of Royal Court whizz-kid, Tony Richardson. Avis Bunnage, by coincidence, was also playing on the Great White Way, in the Theatre Workshop production of Brendan Behan’s The Hostage. She went to see Richardson’s production, but was not impressed. The show was too big, in her opinion, a good example being the full-scale jazz band on stage, in place of the trio that had provided discreet accompaniment to Littlewood’s version. She didn’t like the casting, either: “Joan Plowright was playing the girl. Angela Lansbury was playing the mum, and she looked younger than Joan Plowright”.

Nevertheless, it was Tony Richardson who was to immortalise the play for better or worse in his film version of 1961. Richardson, who had also directed the stage and screen versions of Look Back in Anger, collaborated with Delaney on the screenplay and between them they did away with the stylisation and music hall aspects of the original, going instead for the kind of gritty realism which was rightly making British cinema celebrated at the time.

Delaney and Richardson’s changes, however, were nothing compared to the ones which producer Harry Saltzman had in mind; he wanted to relocate the film to France and cast Leslie Caron as Jo, with Simone Signoret as her mother. In the end, Saltzman pulled out of the project, and instead made a fortune working on the James Bond films. Richardson got alternative backing, and made the film his way: Salford remained the location and Rita Tushingham won the part of Jo, with Dora Bryan as Helen, Robert Stephens as Peter, and Paul Danquah as Jo’s lover. Murray Melvin, as Geoffrey, was the sole survivor from the original production.

The film was both popular and groundbreaking, revolving as it did around a strong-willed working-class female instead of the strong-willed working-class men to be seen in such films as Room at the Top (1959) and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960). It was undoubtedly an inspiration to such widely diverse tales of independent womanhood as Georgie Girl, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Up the Junction and Darling.

As for the original play (or at least the final published version), it remains one of the few stage works from that turbulent period which are still remembered and revived more than five decades on. Its effect on the theatre of the time did not go unnoticed, either. In 1960 Kenneth Tynan was able to look back on Joan Littlewood’s two East End/West End transfers of the previous year (Honey and Brendan Behan’s The Hostage), and reflect on the changes wrought by
them:

“Rowdier and less cerebral than what was going on at the [Royal] Court, Theatre Workshop’s productions nevertheless made a more thorough conquest of the West End. Last summer, at the Criterion and Wyndham’s (the respective homes of Miss Delaney’s first play and Mr Behan’s second), I saw in the audience young people in flimsy dresses and open-necked shirts whose equivalents, ten years ago would have been in a cinema, if they were indoors at all. What is more, they were cheering at the end.”

Robert Cohen
© John Good

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