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.
On the surface, life has changed so much for women since the play premiered in 1958, when the pill was not available and the stigma against single mothers was so strong that orphanages were full of illegitimate children. And yet A Taste of Honey still feels fresh. Via rapid-fire, funny dialogue with hints of Victoria Wood, it tells the story of Jo falling pregnant to Jimmy, a black sailor. When he goes off to sea, she creates something approaching a chosen family with Geof, a gay man desperate to be a father, who is portrayed without judgment at a time when homosexuality remained illegal.
“It feels so unbelievably relevant,” says Jill Halfpenny, taking on the role of Helen. “They are such outliers in the way they live, so much on the boundary of what is acceptable and what is expected of them. The choices they make would still have some people comment and turn their noses up at them today.” Jo is just 15 when she gets pregnant, a year older than Halfpenny was when she got her first break as an actor, starring in Byker Grove alongside Ant and Dec, before being cast in both Coronation Street and EastEnders.
Women are still judged for their choices, particularly as mothers, says director Emma Baggott. She recalls working on a show at the Royal Shakespeare Company just before Covid: “I was the only mother in the company. But there were quite a few fathers and no one ever commented on the fact that the fathers were away for a long period of time from their children. But it was commented upon extensively that I had left my daughter – who was 14 or 15 at the time, and totally fine to be left with her dad.”
Halfpenny, whose 15-year-old son will be home in Tynemouth during the month-long run, says she connects with Helen’s desire to want more than just motherhood: “It’s always exciting to play people who are living in a way that maybe we all wish we could.” Not abandoning your kids, she clarifies, “but being allowed to say, ‘I want something’ without thinking, ‘I must be a terrible mum.’ I think it’s still slightly frowned upon – that somebody who is a mother might also want other things in her life.”
Delaney once described Salford as “like a terrible drug you really perhaps would want to get away from but you can’t.” It’s a line that resonates with Rowan Robinson, playing Jo. Born and bred in Salford, she left as soon as she could, moving to London to study at Rada, only to return now at 22 for her first major stage role. Back living with her mum in Salford for the run, she says she had a sudden realisation of: “Oh my god, this is my home, these are my people.”
Robinson feels an “immense responsibility” to do Salford proud. She is excited to play Jo, whom she describes as a “futuristic” character. Even in 2024, it is rare to see a portrayal of a teenage girl who does not need to be liked, with the confidence to be “unapologetically herself”, she says.
Halfpenny, now 48, understands when female actors complain about reaching a certain age and being sidelined to play mums and wives. But she insists that she, personally, is getting more interesting parts than ever, partly as “so many people are writing better and more for women”. It makes Delaney’s achievement, in creating Helen back in 1958, all the more impressive. “She’s one of the most complex people I’ve played.”
Halfpenny particularly enjoys two women being centre stage, rather than supporting characters to men. “It’s lovely to have that time on stage together where you’re not just coming in as the partner, or as the girlfriend. We have boyfriends coming in. That’s great, isn’t it?”
• A Taste of Honey is at the Royal Exchange, Manchester, from 16 March to 13 April
