Written by Naomi Wallace
She stares up at us, cigarette in hand, the whisper of a smile at the corners of her mouth. Behind an orange haze on the cover of The Smiths’ compilation album Louder Than Bombs sits Shelagh Delaney, the Salford-born playwright whose works profoundly influenced Morrissey’s lyrical career. In an interview for the New Musical Express in 1986, the singer himself declared:
“I’ve never made any secret of the fact that at least 50 per cent of my reason for writing can be blamed on Shelagh Delaney.”
Shelagh Delaney was born in Salford in 1939, the working-class daughter of a bus driver. She wrote her first play, A Taste of Honey (1958), at age seventeen. A Taste of Honey belonged to the “kitchen sink” tradition of mid-twentieth century drama, depicting the reality of working-class life in Britain. The play, set in Manchester, centres around Helen and her daughter Jo, who falls pregnant with the baby of an older man and is forced to navigate teen pregnancy and motherhood. In the emerging post-war tradition of “angry young men” plays, infamously John Osbourne’s Look Back in Anger (1956), Delaney was an angry young woman. Her work was imbued with the bleak disillusionment that characterised the drama of the angry young men playwrights; only it platformed the experiences of women, specifically single mothers, in A Taste of Honey. The play is a daring masterpiece, exploring themes of motherhood, race, and sexuality, all through the focalised perspectives of working-class women. Its centralisation of a gay man as one of its principal characters, almost a decade before the 1967 Sexual Offences Act decriminalised homosexuality in England and Wales, is also notable. In the words of Jeanette Winterson, “Who else, in 1958, was writing about an unmarried pregnant teenager, her gay friend, a gentle sexy black sailor, and a single mother?”.
Of course, it was not so simple as writing a play filled with taboo and putting it on the stage just like that. Until the 1968 Theatres Act, permission had to be granted by the Lord Chamberlain for a play to be performed. The Chief Play Reader at the Lord Chamberlain Office (LCO) wrote of A Taste of Honey in his report:
“This is a surprisingly good play- though God knows it is not to my personal taste. But the people are strangely real and the problem of Geoff [his homosexuality] is delicately conveyed. … The point I wish to make is that this play is balanced on a knife-edge: it is the perfect borderline case, since it is concerned with the forbidden subject in a way that no one, I believe could take exception to.”
He went on to recommend the play for license but suggested the Lord Chamberlain and Controller first read the play themselves. There were instructions given to tone down Geoff’s character; despite this, though his sexuality is never directly remarked on in the play, it is heavily implied. This is probably the closest Delaney could get to having an openly gay character on the stage amid the censorship laws.
The Smiths’ “This Night Has Opened My Eyes” is heavily based on A Taste of Honey, and Morrissey does not attempt to hide this fact, pulling lines directly from the play itself. The words of the first line, “a river the colour of lead” are Delaney’s, and “the dream is gone but the baby is real” is lifted directly from the play. Morrissey’s devotion to the original text is more than clear in his lyrics, and he makes no secret of where he is drawing his inspiration.
A Taste of Honey ends with a teenage girl, alone on stage, about to enter single motherhood. It is bold and devastating, which sums up Shelagh Delaney’s dramatic style and leads one to question why her legacy seems, in my view, so minuscule compared to what it ought to be. Certainly, her words reverberate through The Smiths’ lyrical portfolio and echo across the landscape of the North West. However, Delaney’s work goes beyond Greater Manchester and has the power to resonate deeply with all audiences it reaches.
Bibliography
Lord Chamberlain’s Report and Correspondence about A Taste of Honey. The British Library, 1958, https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/lord-chamberlains-report-and-correspondence-about-a-taste-of-honey.
Shelagh Delaney. A Taste of Honey. Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2014.
Stephen Lacey. British Realist Theatre: The New Wave in Its Context 1956-1965. Routledge, 1995.
Jeanette Winterson, “Shelagh Delaney: The Start of the Possible”, The British Library, 7 September 2017, https://www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/shelagh-delaney-the-start-of-the-possible.
Retrospect Journal 