A Taste of Honey wasn't the first play to examine the everyday life of struggling people with such intensity. While there are many historic precedents, the moral dramas of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen truly set the standard for brute realism. Ghosts, completed in 1881, tells the story of a woman who suffers a lifetime of infidelity because a pastor advised her that her love, and the love of Christ, would cure her husband of his unfaithfulness. But religion doesn't triumph, and the man never reforms. Rather than offer any of its own morals, Ghosts only criticizes the Victorian morals that forced its situation. Delaney was well aware of this ancestor, as Geof responds to Jo's description of her father ("He lived in a twilight land") with the statement, "I'm not surprised. It sounds like Ibsen's Ghosts."
But there was a much closer historical precedent, birthed two years earlier in London's Royal Court Theater. The 1956 premier of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger heralded a movement immediately termed "the angry young men", which ultimately included Kingsley Amos, William Cooper, and perhaps a dozen others, but never found a better emblem than Osborne.
John Osborne was similarly young (26 years), similarly poor (eating nettles fished from the Thames River), similarly efficient (he wrote Look Back in Anger in 17 days), and above all, similarly contemptuous to Shelagh Delaney, and entirely without precedent. Confrontational, bitter, squalid, and viciously opposed to the middle class, the play was a shock that led fellow angry young man Alan Sillitoe to write, "Osborne didn't contribute to British theatre, he set off a landmine and blew most of it up."
The play tells the story of Jimmy Porter, who uses scorn as a shield and wickedness as a distraction. He is overwhelmed by his own sensitivity and pain, and compulsively spreads this pain wherever he goes. The small cast that surrounds him-his wife Alison, his friend Cliff, and his mistress Helena-all are targets for his venom, and all find different ways of coping with his behavior.
Look Back in Anger opens on a Sunday afternoon in the Porters' one-room attic flat. In his few moments onstage, Jimmy manages to describe his closest friend Cliff as "ignorant", "a lump of dough", and "sickening". He criticizes every article in the newspaper, and drinks all the tea. Jimmy saves the worst for his wife, however, insulting both her family and her intelligence ("You haven't had a thought in years, have you?"), and reminding her that she's inferior to his previous love ("she had more animation in her little finger than you two put together"). Alison is obviously acclimated to the abuse, and disarms Jimmy at each turn through a combination of disregard and deference. As he details the virtues of his former mistress Madeline ("Just to be with her was an adventure"), rather than rise to the bait, Alison interjects, "He owes just about everything to Madeline." When he accuses her of being a peasant, Alison absently replies, "What's that?"
But when Jimmy ultimately turns his attention to her friends, he finally incites his desired response. "Jimmy, please-don't go on," Alison pleads after Jimmy discovers this weakness in her defenses. With a visible appetite, Jimmy "gathers himself for a new assault" as the stage direction leads. When Cliff attempts to intervene, Jimmy seems both delighted and taken aback at his success: "Don't think I could provoke her. Nothing I could do would provoke her. Not even if I were to drop dead." He then launches into a tirade that pushes Alison into a mute, inert focus. Jimmy's speech is followed by a silence: "There is no sound, only the plod of Alison's iron. Her eyes are fixed on what she is doing."
It's not a clear enough success for Jimmy, and he carries on, shouting out the windows, cursing the entire female population, and pushing the situation to a grappling brawl with Cliff, ending only when Alison is accidentally burned by the hot iron. The reality of this physical pain forces Jimmy to sympathy, and he responds immediately when Alison demands that he "Get out!" In the calmness that follows, Cliff and Alison try to come to terms with Jimmy's behavior, with Cliff ultimately declaring, "After all, he does love you. You don't need me to tell you that." But neither of them know how to weather Jimmy's love.
During the second act, Alison recounts the circumstances that brought the two together. "I met him at a party. I remember it so clearly," she begins her longest uninterrupted monologue of the play. She describes his obvious beauty: "Everything about him seemed to burn... his eyes were so blue and full of the sun," and his vulnerability: "He looked so young and frail, in spite of the tired line of his mouth." and also his temper: "Well, the howl of outrage and astonishment went up from the family, and that did it. Whether or not he was in love with me, that did it. He made up his mind to marry me."
Her speech goes a long way to illustrating her attraction to Jimmy, but it also spells out some of what drew him to Alison. Although the play clearly portrays Jimmy as a man in love, there is a brutal part to him that sees her as a symbol of his bitterest enemy-the middle class-and is prepared to make any sacrifice for his victory. While Alison never doubts Jimmy's love, she has no illusions about her role as a prize in this battle, explaining that he "came to regard me as a sort of hostage from those sections of society [he] had declared war on."