Shelagh Delaney

Playwright

• Born: November 25, 1938
• Birthplace: Salford, Lancashire, England
• Died: November 20, 2011

Biography

Shelagh Delaney was born on November 25, 1939, in Salford, Lancashire, England. She remembers her father, Joseph, a bus inspector, as a great storyteller and reader. Delaney’s education was erratic, marked by attendance at three primary schools and her failure of the eleven-plus qualifying examinations for grammar school. She was admitted to the Broughton Secondary School and, after a fair record of achievement, was transferred to the more academic local grammar school. At fifteen, she took her General Certificate of Education (GCE), passing in five subjects, and at age seventeen, she left school. She held a number of jobs in succession, working as a shop assistant, a milk depot clerk, an usher, and finally an assistant researcher in the photography department of a large industrial firm.

The encouragement Delaney received at Broughton School led her to continue writing later. She had already begun writing a novel when she saw a performance of Terence Rattigan’s Variation on a Theme (1958); Delaney disliked Rattigan's depiction of British society, particularly his focus on the upper-middle class and his portrayal of homosexuality, and thought she could better. This prompted her to rework her novel as a play, and in ten days she wrote A Taste of Honey (1958). She sent the play to Joan Littlewood, director of the radical Theatre Workshop group, who began rehearsals immediately. A Taste of Honey's initial run began May 27, 1958, at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, and lasted a month. It was restaged six months later at the Theatre Royal and eventually opened in London on February 10, 1959. When they play opened in New York in October 1960, it was very well received and ran for 391 performances.

Delaney’s second play, The Lion in Love (1960), was heavily criticized upon its opening for being verbose, without unity and focus, and its London run was brief. Delaney next turned her efforts to television and film, adapting her short stories to create some of the works. She worked with director Tony Richardson to produce a successful 1961 film adaptation of A Taste of Honey; the film, which differed markedly from the stage version in its realism, earned Delaney and Richardson a British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) Award for best British screenplay, in addition to winning the BAFTA for best British film. With director Lindsay Anderson, she also adapted her story “The White Bus,” from her 1963 collection Sweetly Sings the Donkey, into the short film The White Bus (1967), released as Red, White and Zero in the United States. Her successful screenplay for Charlie Bubbles (1967), reportedly based on another short story, won her a Writers’ Guild Award from the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain.

Throughout the 1970s, most of Delaney’s work was in television, including the BBC series The House That Jack Built (1977), which she adapted for an Off-Off-Broadway production in 1979. Her screenplay for the 1985 film Dance with a Stranger, her first work based on historical, rather than imagined, characters and situations, was a notable success, and she was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature that year.

Delaney died on November 20, 2011, from breast cancer and heart failure. She had a daughter, Charlotte, and three grandchildren.

Analysis

Though very different in style, A Taste of Honey and The Lion in Love share several themes and emphases. Despite early critics’ comments that the plays have “no ideas” and nearly no plot, both communicate effectively the loneliness of their working-class characters and their dreams and frustrations as they deal with the realities of love. In both plays, families are portrayed as strangers brought together by accident of birth and location. Cut off from security and stability by education, social class, and economics, these characters are further isolated by a peculiar stubbornness and pride, in part a defense against the vulnerability that love brings.

Delaney has been applauded for her realism, especially in her language and her treatment of relationships. She deserves equal praise for her creation of a mythic world filled with powerful symbols of brokenness. Delaney’s early critics recognized her regionalism, humor, and vivid women characters, but they frequently assumed that the plays should be closed and climactic, showing issues resolved and measurable growth. Neither The Lion in Love nor A Taste of Honey fulfills such expectations. Instead, Delaney’s world is one in which change is slight and circularity is common: sons behave like fathers, and daughters follow their mothers. Despite Delaney’s humor, this world is a difficult one. Her characters fear and hurt too much to become vulnerable, and they are ultimately detached from one another save for brief moments of consolation followed by antagonism.

A Taste of Honey

A Taste of Honey is briefly told in two acts. As the play opens, Helen, a “semi-whore,” and her sixteen-year-old daughter, Jo, are moving into a desolate two-room flat in Manchester. Helen soon decides to marry Peter, a raffish one-eyed car salesman, and the two abandon Jo. Jo, too, has a love interest, a black sailor who proposes to her and consoles her as Helen and Peter leave. The second act, set six months later, introduces Geof, a gay art student who moves in with Jo, now pregnant from her Christmas affair. Geof fixes up the apartment, attempts to help Jo accept the child, and eventually offers to marry her. In Jo’s last month of pregnancy, Helen returns, her marriage having broken down. She bullies Geof into leaving and takes over as Jo goes into labor. When she discovers that the baby may be black, she leaves, ostensibly for a drink, promising to return. Jo’s last lines are from a nursery rhyme of Geof’s, holding out the promise of a benefactor who will care for her.

A Taste of Honey succeeded in part because of its daring plot but primarily because of the strength of its characterizations, especially that of Jo. Delaney’s realistic dialogue creates a sense of authenticity of character that masks considerable implausibility. Particularly in the opening scenes with Helen and Jo, the rhythm of attack and defense, the revelation of past failures, the barely concealed insults, the self-deprecation, the sharpness, and the sustained talk tantalize the audience. From fragments of conversation, partial revelations, and even asides to the audience, Delaney creates individuals with deep and universal human needs. Out of this battle of words, partially revealing Jo’s hope for love and her need for affirmation from her mother, come the forces that propel her into her love affair.

Delaney’s male characters are significantly weaker than her women. Peter is more a caricature, some of his mannerisms suggesting a middle-class dropout now slumming with Helen. His villainy is stereotypical, complete with eyepatch for a war wound, and he carries a walletful of pictures of other girlfriends even while courting Helen. Geof is equally vague, characterized largely by his homosexuality. He is clearly more sympathetic, in that he makes no demands on Jo, but he is an easy and deferential target for Helen when she returns.

Although it may be said that little happens in the play, its physical and verbal compression makes the characters’ interactions overwhelming. Jo and Helen’s two-room flat reflects a world lacking in intellectual and physical privacy, in which the characters literally have no room to grow and develop. Similarly, the play’s allusiveness contributes to a sense of the mythic nature of the action. References to other works of literature, ranging from nursery rhymes to Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex (ca. 429 BCE), are embedded in the dialogue. That these references are suggested rather than developed fully may reflect Delaney’s youthfulness.

The play’s style, a result of the production techniques of the Theatre Workshop, makes it a mixture of gritty realism and dreams. Both the dialogue and the situations seem realistic: the language has the distinct flavor of a region and a class, and the characters’ reactions to their situation seem authentic. Yet the text also seems stylized and Brechtian in its rapid pacing, asides in the third person to the audience, and music-hall style of humor, including insults and songs. A small jazz band plays between scenes and provides music to which the characters enter and exit, often dancing as they do. Significantly, the play never becomes abstract or allegorical, as do Bertolt Brecht’s Der kaukasische Kreidekreis (1944-1945; The Caucasian Chalk Circle, 1948) and Der gute Mensch von Sezuan (1938-1940; The Good Woman of Setzuan, 1948) when dealing with similar situations.

The collaboration of the Theatre Workshop is important, for A Taste of Honey was significantly reshaped from the original text. John Russell Taylor studied the original text of the play as it went to the Theatre Workshop and the final printed version. Aside from minor cutting to tighten dialogue, two major changes in the performance version are evident. First, the character of Peter is much weakened in performance, and he becomes a much more sinister figure. In the original draft, his marriage to Helen is successful, and he offers to take in both Jo and the baby; as the play ends, Jo seems destined to return to her mother, and Geof is left alone onstage holding the doll that he gave Jo, all that he will have of the relationship. This original ending seems to suggest much greater optimism than the performance version, as well as a significant focus on and greater sympathy for Geof.

A Taste of Honey, by structure and characterization, indicates both the intense needs of its characters for love and affirmation and the likelihood of their failure to meet those needs. Most of the characters voice a longing for affection and love, but nearly all are defensive and uneasy in relationships with others. Although Jo is the most fully realized character, Geof, though shadowy, is more sympathetic because of his willingness to become what Jo needs. Yet his love for her leads to his willingness to leave when Helen pushes him out. Despite Helen and Jo’s reunion at the play’s end, the inability of the characters to adapt their personal needs to those of others leaves only guarded optimism about the future.

The Lion in Love

The Lion in Love, a three-act play set in the north of England, is both more compressed and more diverse than A Taste of Honey. Delaney has extended her range of characters with an entire family, the Freskos: grandfather Jesse; his daughter, Kit, and her husband, Frank; and their children, Banner and Peg. She further includes minor characters: Nora, who is having an affair with Frank; Loll, Peg’s boyfriend and fiancé; and Andy and Nell, the former an injured acrobat and a pimp for the latter.

Instead of nine months of action, as in her previous play, Delaney dramatizes three days several weeks apart, yet this does not tighten the structure of the play. Although characters confront opportunities for fulfillment, most of them lose their chance through either hesitation or fear. The action consequently seems either directionless or circular, with little external change. Frank, who sells toys from a suitcase stand in the marketplace, spends most of his time with Kit arguing and being insulted. Either a permanent booth or Nora’s offer to set up a shop with him would mean personal and economic security. In the end, Frank gains neither, and he remains trapped in his complex and antagonistic relationship with Kit. Peg and Loll, though able to see what has happened to the older generation, seem no wiser or better able to govern their emotions, and Peg apparently elopes with Loll. Only Banner, in his departure for Australia, is able to escape the limitations of marriage, but at the cost of abandoning his family and any support they may offer. Even Nell and Andy and their dreams of a new act for performance are blighted: he is not as good a dancer as she thought.

The title of the play comes from an Aesopian fable in which a lion permits a forester to remove his claws and teeth as preconditions for marrying the forester’s daughter. Once the lion submits, the forester kills him. The moral, “Nothing can be more fatal to peace than the ill-assorted marriages into which rash love may lead,” applies to both the parents and the children of the Fresko family. Both Kit and Frank seem to have lost by their marriage, and Loll and Peg may do the same. The back-and-forth banter of the partners, the attempts at friendship and intimacy, and the defensiveness and caution are the same in both the younger and the older lovers.

Once again, Delaney focuses more on the women of the play than the men. Although Kit does not enter immediately, she dominates the action and provides the center of interest. In a sense, the other members of her family exist only in their reactions to her. Her love of life and excitement, her determination not to behave as an adult and accept adult limitations, and her chosen independence from children, husband, and father make her a dynamic figure in an otherwise unchanging situation. She seems always to transcend the limitations of situation, class, and economic factors. Yet her “liveliness” is in fact destructive, provoking her husband’s affairs and her daughter’s disillusionment and eventual elopement. Although Peg is much less developed than Kit, her story will probably be the same, as she has the same wit, insight, and longings as her mother.

Delaney’s men are, once again, shadowy or insufficient figures. Although each has plans and dreams, none seem able to realize them or even develop commitment to them. They wander aimlessly, which may communicate a psychological truth but which confuses audiences. Jesse—the grandfather, the garrulous commentator on life, the link with the past—seems, despite his history, to have little to offer. Frank is much more fully realized, but his motives are still confused, and he is unable to confront his reasons for returning to Kit. Banner and Loll are undeveloped, each with a dream that necessitates leaving and has only vague longings to support it.

The Lion in Love has a quite different production style from that of A Taste of Honey. Gone are the Brechtian elements, the asides, the jazz band in the wings, the dancing entrances and exits. Although the stage directions indicate that the set is “suggested rather than real,” with a backdrop that is “a fantastic panorama” of the city and “the local bombed-site” at the back, the play is much more conventionally realistic. Although the stage action is at points quite lively, as at the opening of act 2, set on market day, the pacing throughout is measured. The biting humor of A Taste of Honey remains, but not the mixture of fantasy and reality.

Other Literary Forms

Three of Shelagh Delaney’s screenplays have become successful films: her adaptation of A Taste of Honey, cowritten with Tony Richardson; Charlie Bubbles, based on one of her short stories; and Dance with a Stranger, based on a celebrated murder case and trial of the mid-1950s. Delaney has also written several teleplays, including “St. Martin’s Summer” (1974), for the series Seven Faces of Woman; “Did Your Nanny Come from Bergen?” (1970), for Thirty-Minute Theatre; the television movie Find Me First (1981); and the miniseries The House That Jack Built, adapted for stage performance in New York in 1979. In 1963, she published a collection of semiautobiographical short stories titled Sweetly Sings the Donkey. A number of her essays appeared in the 1960s in the New York Times Magazine and Cosmopolitan.

Achievements

Shelagh Delaney was highly regarded for her ability to create working-class characters and to express the difficulties of their lives in industrial northern England. She is a playwright of a particular region and social class, as evidenced in both A Taste of Honey (which won the New York Drama Critics citation for best foreign play in 1961) and The Lion in Love. Her focus on the domestic tensions in the lives of working-class families is especially sympathetic to women, though never sentimental. Delaney’s early work for the stage and her later television, film, and radio plays seem to revolve around the dreams and frustrations of women in contemporary society. While she was at first mistaken as an “Angry Young Woman,” her focus was generally not on large social issues but rather on individuals confronting their economic and social limitations and dealing with their illusions. A Taste of Honey, The Lion in Love, and several of her works in other media focus on characters who belong to families yet who are isolated even from those closest to them. That her characters face their difficulties with humor and wit sets her apart from many of her contemporaries, such as John Osborne.

Bibliography

Barker, Dennis. "Shelagh Delaney Obituary." Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 21 Nov. 2011. Web. 30 Mar. 2016.

Delaney, Charlotte. "Shelagh Delaney: A True Rebel." National Theatre Blog. Natl. Theatre, 25 Feb. 2014. Web. 29 Mar. 2016.

Delaney, Shelagh. “How Imagination Retraced a Murder.” New York Times 4 Aug. 1985: B15. Print.

Gillett, Eric. “Regional Realism: Shelagh Delaney, Alun Owen, Keith Waterhouse, and Willis Hall.” Experimental Drama. Ed. William A. Armstrong. London: Bell, 1963. 186–203. Print.

Harding, John. Sweetly Sings Delaney: A Study of Shelagh Delaney's Work, 1958–68. London: Greenwich, 2014. Print.

Kitchin, Laurence. Mid-Century Drama. 2nd rev. ed. London: Faber, 1969. Print.

Oberg, Arthur K. “A Taste of Honey and the Popular Play.” Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature 7.2 (1966): 160–67. JSTOR. Web. 29 Mar. 2016.

Taylor, John Russell. The Angry Theatre: New British Drama. Rev. and expanded ed. New York: Hill, 1969. Print.

Weber, Bruce. "Shelagh Delaney, Author of the Play A Taste of Honey, Dies at 72." New York Times. New York Times, 24 Nov. 2011. Web. 29 Mar. 2016.

Wellwarth, George E. The Theater of Protest and Paradox: Developments in the Avant-Garde Drama. Rev. ed. New York: New York UP, 1971. Print.