In 1958, the town of Salford was considered home to the worst slums in England, a reputation vindicated by a 1931 national survey. Located in the county of Great Manchester, on the western border of the city of Manchester, Salford's population decreased steadily and drastically throughout the 20th century, as citizens fled unemployment and poverty. In the years following World War Two, the Salford Docks-once the primary employer of the region-became a ruin of decaying warehouses and desperate laborers, sheltering more rats than people. Shelagh Delaney was 18 years old in 1958, three years before the Salford city council voted to raze its rotted, infested tenements and replace them with high-rise residential blocks. It had been two years since she had quit school, two years filled with aimless labor as a shop assistant and usherette. It was in 1958, during the latter of these occupations, that she watched a tragedy by England's famed playwright, Terence Rattigan. Unmoved by his middle class drama, Delaney declared that she could do better, and in fourteen days set down the text of A Taste of Honey.
A Taste of Honey debuted at the Theatre Royal Stratford East in London in the spring of 1958. The play tells the story of Jo, a teenaged girl in Salford; Jo is poor, disillusioned, friendless and pregnant. Her circle is pitiably small, her relations all marked by compromise.
Helen, Jo's mother, is crass, immature and selfish. During their sickeningly steady bickering, she unashamedly defends her behavior by declaring her own irresponsibility: "Have I ever laid claim to being a proper mother?" Helen alternates between criticism and unconcern for her daughter, steadily undermining Jo's sense of self. While their time spent together is harsh, for Jo, their time spent apart is even more bitter. Helen's indifference to her daughter is constant, but it's sharpest when she's simply not there.
It's during this isolation that Jo meets two men that will alter the course of her life. The first is Jimmie, a black sailor exclusively referred to as "the Boy" throughout the text. It's Jimmie that Jo embarks with on her first romance, a mess of bad intentions and charm ("I dreamt about you last night. Fell out of bed twice." Jimmie once tells her), and it's Jimmie who disappears long before Jo realizes he's going to be a father. "He came in with Christmas and went out with the New Year," she explains.
Geoffrey, a gay art student, is nearly the opposite creature; no charm and all sensitivity. Geof provides the first sympathy and affection that Jo has ever known, though it's bound up in his blunt, graceless way. Fiercely honest and untrammeled by any sexual attraction to Jo, Geof offers himself in marriage but ends up as a surrogate mother instead, all mopping and cooking and advising. For Geof, this isn't simply penance or philanthropy, rather he receives a payment for his services. "Before I met you I didn't care one way or the other," he explains to Jo, "I didn't care whether I lived or died. But now..."
When Geof is first introduced in A Taste of Honey, he is penniless, friendless, and homeless. Turned out by his landlady after she discovers that he's gay, Geof is at his most abject, his most persecuted. A month or two later, when he confesses to Jo that she's given him purpose, he's still poor, and sleeping on Jo's sofa, but his spirit has changed at its most fundamental level, his aimlessness reversed. It's telling that his will to live is only activated by purpose; their poverty is immaterial.
Geoffrey is as clearly struck and as fearful of loneliness as Jo. At its highest functioning, the relationship between Geof and Jo is a delicate ritual to ward off this constant threat. Ultimately, it's not hard to see that all the characters in A Taste of Honey are similarly affected: to read Helen's disappearances as an unending search for companionship; to recognize Jimmie's courtship of Jo as the desperation of a sailor on shore leave; even to see Peter, the rich Londoner who takes Helen away from her daughter, as an old man in fear of dying alone.
This curtain thrown back on working class life, revealing all its hopelessness and broken taboo and isolation, was an immediate shock to the nation. Reviews tended to denounce its depravity, but the reviewers themselves were transfixed. There seemed to be a voyeuristic, carnal glee in watching the characters plow through forbidden topics: premarital sex, abortion, relations between black men and white women, homosexuality. Many critics could barely articulate the depth of this perversion, with only the bravest ones referring to Geof as "homosexual" rather than "effeminate." For many, the play represented the downfall of the theater ("does only sordid stuff sell now?") and the shipwrecked morals of the youth ("it is an unhappy thing that a young girl of 20 years should have such a low thought pattern"). Her hometown took it particularly hard, and the Salford City Reporter ran its review of the play under the headline, "A taste of cash for Shelagh, but a kick in the pants for Salford." Because, despite this critical righteousness, A Taste of Honey was a tremendous success.