It was after her very first trip to the theatre that 19-year-old Shelagh Delaney wrote A Taste of Honey, hammered out on a borrowed typewriter after deciding she could do better than the play she had seen on a date at Manchester’s Opera House. Sixty-six years later, and 13 years after her death from breast cancer, her sparky debut is being staged half a mile away at the Royal Exchange, still a trading post for cotton during Delaney’s teenage years.
Almost nothing is left of Delaney’s soot-stained, seedy Salford. The docks of the script are now home to the BBC at Media City, with gleaming high-rises packed full of international students replacing the tumbledown terraces where a promiscuous mother, Helen, abandons her teenage daughter, Jo, in a grimy bedsit.
