A Taste of Honey
Tony Richardson (1961 )
You could read the plot of the stage play as a mixture of fantasy and realism on the part of the author: a working-class girl, acutely aware of what’s expected to lie ahead for her, imagines unexpected, in different ways impossible, relationships with two men, and ultimately recognises their impossibility. Shelagh Delaney’s protagonist Jo has fun with a black sailor and gets pregnant by him the night before his ship sails and he disappears forever; the homosexual art student Geoffrey then moves in with and mothers her – in ways that Jo’s own mother Helen has never done. Just before Jo’s baby is due, Helen’s affair with her latest fancy man ends and, with nowhere better to go, she moves back in with her daughter and ousts Geoffrey. Delaney was eighteen when she wrote A Taste of Honey. Her self-assurance and intelligence come across loud and clear in Ken Russell’s Monitor film about her and her home town of Salford – broadcast in September 1960, just a few weeks before Coronation Street began and the year before the release of the film version of A Taste of Honey. It wouldn’t be fair to describe Delaney as a flash in the pan: she’s written again for the stage and for radio and published short stories; she did the screenplays for Charlie Bubbles (1968) and Dance with a Stranger (1985). But she’s never come close to repeating the scale of the success she enjoyed with A Taste of Honey. This, in combination with the evident elements of autobiography in the piece, makes it hard not to see Delaney’s first work as the work in which she fully expressed herself.
We think of a stage play as the work of a writer, of a film as the work of a director. Tony Richardson went on to make movies as differently good as Tom Jones (1963) and Blue Sky (released in 1994, three years after his death) but A Taste of Honey, from Woodfall Films (the company Richardson formed with John Osborne), belongs firmly to the period when he was the natural choice to direct screen adaptations of stage hits with socially relevant themes – following Look Back in Anger (1959) and The Entertainer (1960). A Taste of Honey offers the possibility of ‘opening out’ the action more than either of the other two. (Look Back in Anger depends on the claustrophobia of Jimmy and Alison Porter’s cramped flat. The Entertainer has to be rooted in the theatres that Archie Rice plays.) Richardson makes plenty of use of the streets of Salford, where the film was largely shot; there’s also an expedition to Blackpool. The latter is one of the strongest sequences: the documentary setting and the fairground attractions (especially the hall of mirrors) are the context in which the tensions between Jo, Helen and her seedy beau Peter simmer and boil over – and Jo is given her bus fare back to Salford. It’s that evening that she and the sailor Jimmy have sex and Jo gets pregnant: there’s a rather beautiful pair of shots of the landscape, dominated by a gasometer, before and after the sexual episode (that we don’t see). The whole film is well shot and lit by Walter Lassally and a lot of the dialogue is excellent (Delaney and Richardson shared the screenplay credit). But A Taste of Honey is unsatisfying: I think this is largely because Richardson on the one hand pushes for social commentary, as if Jo’s experience is entirely typical, and on the other presents the ‘good’ characters in A Taste of Honey – that is, the youngsters, who seem to be paying the price for the rotten society the older generation created – in a way that overemphasises their sweet innocence and comes across as condescending.
Shelagh Delaney was clearly socially (self-)conscious but implying that Jo isn’t unusual seems a travesty of the original material. At one point (which Richardson shoots rather too ostentatiously), Jo and Geoffrey lyrically celebrate their uniqueness: ‘I’m one of a kind … and so are you … we’re bloody marvellous!’ There are childlike elements in the pair’s relationship – it can’t be sexual and they like reciting nursery rhymes to each other, and inventing new words to these. Unfortunately, Richardson links this to what seems to have been a standard detail in any British film of the period that wanted to be grittily urban – children’s rhymes and songs in the street (cf Tiger Bay, Term of Trial and so on). It’s OK, given the importance of a nautical character in the story, to have kids singing ‘The Big Ship Sails on the Alley-Alley-O’ over the title credits but this is only a drop in the ocean of what follows and, because it’s so familiar from other contemporary films, detracts from the distinctiveness of the story. Worse, the score by John Addison is also infuriatingly typical of the period: a character can’t express any kind of mood without the music supplying an unnecessary explanation of what an actor’s just shown; Addison mixes this with variations on the childhood songs heard or suggested by images (eg Jo washes her face, blows a bubble and sets off ‘I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles’). The effect is rather like when someone in a cinema audience is giving a running commentary to the person next to them.
Some things don’t make a lot of sense – whether or not this is because of bits being clumsily cut out or the play not being sufficiently rethought for the screen is hard to say. Jo doesn’t shine academically or in sport at secondary school but she has a portfolio of drawings and, when Helen discovers them, she asks her daughter if she’s interested in going on to art college. Jo says not (she goes to work in a shoeshop when she – very suddenly – leaves school) but it seems odd that she doesn’t, as far as we can see, even tell kindred spirit and art student Geoffrey about her own work. Geoffrey talks about what Helen’s like when he’s not yet met her: this wouldn’t be a problem if Jo went on about her mother so often and vividly that he felt he already knew her, but there’s no virtually no evidence of that. A cat appears in a basket in Jo and Geoffrey’s flat at one point and is never seen again. The improbability of Peter actually wanting to marry, rather than have a fling with, Helen is pointed up by how very short-lived their married life turns out to be – the twists and turns in this relationship are driven purely by the demands of the plot. There are a few bits that stick out as the kind of thing you accept in a stage play but which, in a story set in a real world, become incredible – such as seventeen year old Jo asking her mother, supposedly for the first time, what her father was like.
The acting is a puzzle. Much of it is very good but all four principals sometimes suggest they’re reprising stage roles – even though Murray Melvin (Geoffrey) is the only one actually doing so. Rita Tushingham, a new face at the time, must have made a great impression. Her unusual looks – how hard it is to decide whether she’s ugly or plain or beautiful – would have been enough for audiences not to notice that she’s much more convincing when she’s not speaking: her readings are competent enough but lack the variety of the physical side of her performance. She’s especially expressive when she’s doing something simple like washing her face and splendid fooling around in class, mimicking the teacher. Although her success as Jo set Tushingham up for roles in other big films made during the next few years (The Knack, Doctor Zhivago), she’ll always be associated with this role. The same goes for Dora Bryan as Helen, who’s occasionally overeager with a laugh line but, all in all, impressive – particularly in the moments when we see Helen’s helpless, slightly guilty fecklessness. Tony Richardson sometimes wants to make physical fun of Bryan’s character in her tight-fitting, mutton-dressed-as-lamb costumes but the actress is largely sympathetic. She sings a song in a pub with a perfect fusion of coarseness and vitality. Robert Stephens has Peter down pat: although he occasionally overdoes the loutish grotesqueness, he makes a strong impact. Murray Melvin’s comical melancholy is very likeable and his line readings, even if they don’t always sound fresh, are always thoughtful and sensitive – although the most successful ones are throwaways. Melvin and Paul Danquah, as the good-looking Jimmy, are perfectly complementary physical types, and this brings out their shared good nature effectively. Danquah gives Jimmy depth and mystery – it’s a pity this actor didn’t do much subsequently.
21 April 2011