Theatre Review: Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey at Oldham Coliseum

Shelagh Delaney’s masterful example of Northern kitchen sink drama is brought to life in a comic and dark production at Oldham Coliseum. The faithful adaptation tells of Jo, a teenager who escapes her mother and their Salford bedsit before falling pregnant and finding comfort with a gay art student who is also bruised by rejection. A performance of ‘A Taste of Honey’ in 2018 is always going to highlight the homophobia and racism that Delaney aims to capture in her script. The repeated digs of ‘Nancy’ and ‘Pansy’ to Geoffrey, the gay art student helping Jo, are shocking to hear and draw awkward laughs and shock from the audience. Jo’s fear of having a black baby is given credence by her mother’s actions, and when Helen, played by Kerrie Taylor as a self centred yet sympathetic character, turns to the audience as asks ‘What would you do?’ it’s with hope that you presume the audience would think differently from when the play was set. The latest revival highlights the position of the play as a precursor to Coronation Street and to a change in how working-class characters were portrayed in theatre and television. At points it can almost feel that we are a live studio audience such is the square set and the snippets of 4th wall breaking. Delaney’s classic of northern theatre has a welcome return as a piece of history but also as it shines a light on our own times’ prejudices and what it means to be working class in modern day Manchester.

Fri 25 May – Sat 9 Jun (not Sun or Mon), Oldham Coliseum Theatre, Fairbottom Street, Oldham, OL1 3SW, Tel: 0161 624 2829, 7.30pm (and selected days 2.30pm), £16-23, www.coliseum.org.uk