Susannah Clapp: On Shelagh Delaney

Susannah Clapp

In 1963 Shelagh Delaney published a story based on the hate mail and begging letters she received when A Taste of Honey made her famous. ‘It is probably fair to say that it is one of the best plays ever written by a 19-year-old photographer’s assistant. But … she knows as much about adult behaviour as she does about elephants’; ‘Will you lend me £100? I am a Methodist minister’s daughter brought up in a good home so you are dealing with a conscientious decent honourable person’; ‘It is an unhappy thing that a young girl of twenty years should have such a low thought pattern’; ‘PLEASE I BEG OF YOU DON’T TELL A SOUL OF MY LETTER … as I’ve had eight children I suffer from very varicosed legs.’

Delaney had received much encouragement. She had written A Taste of Honey when she was nineteen; it took her ten days. It was staged by Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop in 1958 and filmed by Tony Richardson in 1961. She had a cushion of money; she had critical acclaim: Graham Greene, who gave her a golf-ball typewriter to write her next play, proclaimed her to be as ‘fresh’ as John Osborne and (not a very high bar) more ‘mature’. Vituperation wasn’t going to knock out her popularity but praise tended to box in her reputation. She was a visionary who was often treated as if she were a reporter. The Los Angeles Times obituary scooped up the received view of her work: ‘kitchen-sink realism’ (Delaney was more bedroom than kitchen), which showed the ‘gritty reality of working-class life’ (while Noël Coward shows the polished reality of dressing-gown life?). So: niche, grim and documentary, with a career that peaked early and flattened. It is a recognisable summary but it only skims the surface of what Delaney was up to and does not touch on the diffused effect she has had. In 1960, two years after seeing A Taste of Honey, Tony Warren launched Coronation Street. Twenty-six years later, Morrissey declared that ‘at least 50 per cent of my reason for writing can be blamed on Shelagh Delaney’; he more than once used lines from the plays: ‘I dreamt about you last night. Fell out of bed twice.’

Delaney changed conversations on and off the stage: about the North (Andy Burnham please note); about people who have pens but no penises (though ‘female playwright’ still lingers as a mysterious category); about elective families; about nostalgia and escape. She never stopped writing. Between the stage version of A Taste of Honey and the movie, there was The Lion in Love. Between 1964 and 1978 there were scripts for BBC’s Z-Cars. There were memorable films: Charlie Bubbles in 1968; Dance with a Stranger in 1985. There were television plays with twanging titles: Did Your Nanny Come from Bergen? And throughout, there were those most unregarded of dramas: radio plays.

To mark the seventieth anniversary of A Taste of Honey in 2028, Delaney’s daughter, Charlotte, and her long-term producer, Polly Thomas, are planning a Delaney season in Salford. A documentary will go out on Radio 4 later this year and Jools Holland is working on a musical version of A Taste of Honey. To kick things off, Catch Me Who Can, written as a short stage play but never produced, has just been released as an audio drama on Spotify. Charlotte, who worked with her mother for many years, has pointed up a few references to make the period – 1978 – clear and translated some visual signals. She found the play after her mother’s death and immediately recognised the imprint of the IBM golf ball: the paper was so thin and the print so inky that she had to retype the whole thing. She also recognised herself in the teenage heroine, Hattie.

Hattie has bunked off from her London school and run away. She has Bunty in her bag along with a copy of Wuthering Heights, because of Kate Bush. She has tried sleeping in King’s Cross Station and at the back of an Oxfam shop; now she is in a park. The landscape of the capital is summoned, with Delaney-style unexpectedness, by the quacking of ducks. Out jogging, her maths teacher (overweight, lives with his mother) comes across her and tries to winkle out the reasons for her flight. A dispatch rider swings by – a freewheeler, like the sailor in A Taste of Honey. He has a spare lid; he will, perhaps, take her back home. From time to time an elderly woman rummaging in dustbins, lugging around a plastic bag full of shoes, lets loose vatic pronouncements about anarchy and flashes her knickers.

Thomas has directed a tight 30-minute sprint. In a nice backward loop, Rita Tushingham, who played Jo in the film of A Taste of Honey, creates the part of the old lady. The maths teacher is Toby Jones, who has spoken of the importance of radio plays, of the early pleasure of listening to them in the dark. Delaney – born within two years of another fluent radio dramatist, Angela Carter – grew up when radio was the wireless. Now, transmuted into ‘audio’, different writers (most recently, Richard Curtis) are taking it on. New actors, too: alongside Xavier Moras Spencer as the biker, there is a strong debut by 14-year-old Ivy Sheehan in the part of the runaway.

Catch Me Who Can is shot through with family biography. Charlotte ran away when she was fourteen: her mother thought she had been murdered. The teacher had a real-life counterpart. As does the runaway’s admired grandmother who, like Shelagh Delaney’s own mother, had a breakdown: the fictional gran says she was driven mad by knitting the many squares of a patchwork quilt; the schoolteacher says that he loves to watch women knitting – so soothing.

Delaney’s speeches do, as her daughter says, ‘fall easily out of the actors’ mouths’. The rhythm sounds impromptu, yet the vocabulary and references are rich: Hattie quotes from Animal Farm and calls the lavatory the ‘pissoir’. Delaney proves that being down to earth does not require linguistic or emotional bluntness. She said she was spurred to write by seeing Terence Rattigan’s Variations on a Theme, with its ‘safe, sheltered, cultured lives in charmed surroundings’, foreign to most people’s experience. Her characters have less charmed surroundings and their reactions to events are unusual on the stage, where repining is more common than stoicism. ‘No one in my play despairs. Like the majority of people they take in their stride whatever happens to them and remain cheerful.’

In an excruciating ITN piece transmitted just before A Taste of Honey opened in the West End, an interviewer with vowels as crimped as his hair asks Delaney how much ‘hyelp’ she had in writing her play. He tells her that A Taste of Honey has ‘rather a sordid theme’ and asks where she gets her information. She doesn’t so much laugh in his face as ripple: ‘I just applied my imagination to my observation.’ Ken Russell’s BBC film Shelagh Delaney’s Salford opens with the flaccid adjectives ‘grey, industrial’, before Delaney’s voice comes in and with it transfixing images: a bloke in the market yelling his wares in a pair of dangling glitter earrings; the gliding hulls of boats; a church bearing the label ‘Sold but not closed’. The place is, she said, like ‘a terrible drug’; she wanted to get away but could not. It was ‘dirty’ but ‘dramatic’.

It is Delaney’s imagination that now seems striking. A Taste of Honey showed ways of living thought by some to be shocking and others merely to be bleak. No nuclear families or stable housing arrangements. Instead, in a city dominated by the shifting world of the docks, a single mother neglects her teenage daughter, Jo, who falls in love and then becomes pregnant by a black sailor; a young gay man – with a flair for cooking and textiles – wants to take care of her and the baby. Salford Council denounced the play as bringing the city into disrepute (they later recanted, wanting her to donate her manuscripts to the local library); even her obituary in the Guardian in 2011 described the characters as ‘dysfunctional’. They now, at least some of them, look prescient, generous, flexible. The young man, played in the film by a subtly watchful Murray Melvin, does not get his own way – the play is part tragedy – but his views and feelings triumph. In the original version (cut for stage and film) this was still more apparent. He gets the last word, defeated but utterly sympathetic. He explodes at Jo’s mother, who has declared that she does after all want her daughter ‘and her chocolate-coloured coon’; he looks at a rubber doll, ‘the nearest I’ll ever get to a son and heir’, and around at his empty room, ‘all the curtains drawn, the doors locked, all the fires put out’. He leads you to imagine a different future.

There is vivacity in the scummy – in the film, Robert Stephens is a tremendous spiv, tempting Jo’s mother, played by Dora Bryan, with the promise of crazy paving – and in the desperate: Jo and her mother climbing out of a basement window to avoid paying rent, Bryan carrying a budgie in a cage. I had remembered Bryan’s character as a monster. I see her differently now: mistreated, valiant, a still youngish woman trying to scrape by on her looks, chirruping against the odds: ‘Why – because he loves me!’ she croons to a pub piano. She is brilliantly performed: callous and canny and wounded and slinky in her bottom-hugging cocktail frock.

Grit was only ever part of the story, in drama and in dress. ‘I’d much rather buy big things that aren’t real,’ Delaney told the Observer in 1960. She bought ‘bangles and earrings that look like toned-down stage effects’. She loved her daughter’s punk bondage trousers. She had a ‘highly unlikely’ nightdress: white pleated nylon on Grecian lines. ‘Whenever I wear it, I look like a cross between Lysistrata and Aphrodite.’ You see the combination in the BBC film, when she swings into the house where she wrote A Taste of Honey, nearly six feet tall, shrugging off elegance in a white mac. She didn’t stoop and often did not wear her glasses, so could avoid looking people in the eye, which enhanced her nonchalant glamour, though she once burned a slew of dust jackets because she hated the author photo.

Charlie Bubbles pivots on a return to Salford and on a young boy briefly going missing. Running away, running back, dreaming of escape pulses through Delaney’s writing. The runaway in Catch Me Who Can can’t explain why she has scarpered but knows she had to. Delaney herself talked eloquently about her surges of restlessness in Salford. She failed the eleven-plus but was later transferred to a grammar school, where she looked back ruefully – as many of us did – on her former classmates at the secondary modern, just as capable but more likely to be headed for a dull job. She thought of them as ‘tethered’, like ponies; she was ‘dead lucky’ having writing to occupy her.

Delaney’s characters are always saying goodbye. In the third part of a radio trilogy, Baloney Said Salome (the near double-sausage joke in the title comes from a skipping game), four ‘gruesome old women’ – ‘one mercy killer, one rich but miserable widow, a convicted fraudster and a sexually repressed ex-nun’ – squabble and watch foxes playing in the moonlight. One of them fancies a solicitor who smells of limes. One is dying and wants to sit in the garden at night. ‘In the dark?’ someone asks. ‘It’s just shadow,’ the woman replies. The particular goodbye which punctuates A Taste of Honey is here a defiant lightness as death approaches. Essence of Delaney: a farewell that sounds like a fanfare. ‘Ta-ra!’

Send Letters To:

The Editor London Review of Books, 28 Little Russell Street London, WC1A 2HNletters@lrb.co.uk Please include name, address, and a telephone number.