R.I.P. Shelagh Delaney

[Reza]

Shelagh Delaney obituary

Feisty playwright best known for her ground-breaking debut, A Taste of Honey
Dennis Barker guardian.co.uk,
Monday 21 November 2011 10.04 EST

Shelagh Delaney was 18 when she wrote A Taste of
Honey, one of the defining plays of the 1950s
working-class and feminist cultural movements.
The play's group of dysfunctional characters,
utterly alien to the prevailing middle-class
"anyone for tennis?" school of theatre, each
explored their chances of attaining a glimpse of
happiness. The central character, a young girl
named Jo, lives in a decrepit flat in Salford
with her mother, who is apt to wander off in
pursuit of men with money. Jo becomes pregnant by
a black sailor and is cared for by Geoffrey, a
young gay friend, until her mother ousts him in
what could be a burst of suppressed maternal love
or a display of jealous control-freakery.

Delaney, who has died of cancer aged 71, had to
endure harsh criticism for her attack on the
orthodoxies of the period. Her play was
innovative in breaking several taboos discreetly
observed by the likes of Noel Coward and Terence
Rattigan, in whose dramas working-class
characters generally appeared as chirpy
subsidiaries and who mostly presented women as
either madonnas or sluts. A Taste of Honey showed
working-class women from a working-class woman's
point of view, had a gay man as a central and
sympathetic figure, and a black character who was
neither idealised nor a racial stereotype.

The play opened on 27 May 1958, at the Theatre Royal
Stratford East, in London, where its success owed
a great deal to Joan Littlewood, who did much to mother both
playwright and play. In Salford, where Delaney
was born, the council fumed that the portrayal
was an insult to the town but when it became a
runaway success, and Delaney a national
celebrity, she was asked for her manuscript copy
for its library. The feisty Delaney, who disliked
being called a "six-footer" (she was 5ft 11in)
called them hypocrites, and gave the original script to Littlewood instead.
Rita Tushingham and Paul Danquah in Tony Richardson's film of A
Rita Tushingham and Paul Danquah in Tony
Richardson's film of A Taste of Honey. Photograph: The Ronald Grant Archive

A Taste of Honey moved to the Wyndham's theatre,
in the West End, in 1959. Delaney received the
Charles Henry Foyle award for best new play and
an Arts Council England bursary. In the same
year, she sold the film rights for 20,000, then
a considerable sum. The film, which she scripted
with the director Tony Richardson, and which
starred Rita Tushingham as Jo, Dora Bryan as her
mother and Murray Melvin as Geoffrey, was
released in 1961. It won four Bafta awards,
including best British screenplay and best
British film. Tushingham won a Bafta for best
newcomer and received an award at Cannes, as did Melvin.

Delaney was firmly launched on a playwright's
career, but her subsequent work never achieved an
impact as great as her groundbreaking debut. The
familiar difficulty of writing a second hit bore
down especially hard on her, not least because
her first play had succeeded due to its apparent
unselfconscious spontaneity. High expectations
were disappointed with The Lion in Love, which
was produced in 1960 at the Belgrade theatre, in
Coventry, and transferred to the Royal Court in London later that year.

Conservative critics such as WA Darlington did
not like this portrayal of another northern
family: a hard-drinking mother, a husband lacking
the courage to leave her and a son choosing to
quit home for Australia. However, a new breed of
critics represented by Bernard
Levin were more encouraging. "The fact is, Miss
Delaney is not only a shrewd and penetrating
observer; she is a very delicate artist," wrote Levin.

Delaney's background made A Taste of Honey and
The Lion in Love autobiographical, at least in
spirit. She had Irish grandparents, one of them
an ardent socialist. Her father was a bus
inspector and an avid reader and storyteller. He
would recount with flair his experiences in the
Lancashire Fusiliers in north Africa.

Among the most vivid experiences of Delaney's
childhood were going to the Salford Hippodrome
and to the cinema, sometimes three times a week.
She attended three primary schools, failed the
11-plus and attended secondary school in
Broughton, Lancashire, where the headteacher
encouraged her to watch the school production of
Othello. She was 12 and had already realised that
she could write better than the other pupils in
the class. Her interest in drama waxed as her
interest in school work waned. She made three
half-hearted attempts to transfer to the local
grammar school but got there only at the age of
15. She left at 17 and had little interest in
studying to be a teacher, the most realistic
career path on offer. Instead, she took dead-end
jobs as a clerk in a milk depot, a shop
assistant, an usherette at Manchester opera house
and a worker in the research photography
department of the electrical engineering company Metropolitan-Vickers.

A Taste of Honey began as a novel but Delaney, as
she later admitted, was soon too busy going out
dancing and socialising to produce an 80,000-word
book. A play seemed better attuned to her
impulsive talent, and when she saw Rattigan's
Variations On a Theme on tour, she thought she
could do better. She took a fortnight off and wrote A Taste of Honey.

Her subsequent career was mercurial and
chequered. In 1960 A Taste of Honey opened on
Broadway in New York with Joan Plowright as Jo
and Angela Lansbury as her mother and ran for
almost a year, with Plowright winning a Tony
award for her performance. In the UK, the short
BBC Monitor documentary Shelagh
Delaney's Salford, directed by Ken Russell,
profiled the author in her home town.

In 1963, a book of her short stories, Sweetly
Sings the Donkey, was published. Gradually she
began to move towards films and television rather
than the stage, a transition which she said was
fine when it worked but it often didn't. Her
screenplay for Lindsay Anderson's film The White
Bus (1967) dealt with an enigmatic young girl
from the north who retreats from her disastrous
office life in London to view her home town as a
visitor on a sightseeing bus. She also wrote
Charlie Bubbles (1967), starring Albert Finney
who also directed as a writer running out of
material and behaving in obsessive and
destructive ways; the film became something of a
cult movie in its quietly bizarre way. Her
television plays in the 1970s included Did Your
Nanny Come from Bergen?, St Martin's Summer and
The House That Jack Built, a six-parter for the
BBC in 1977 that was subsequently staged in New York.

She continued to write new material, including
the radio plays So Does the Nightingale (1980) and Don't
Worry About Matilda (1983), but her earlier work
continued to gain greater attention. Lines from A
Taste of Honey were adopted in lyrics by the
Smiths and she featured
on the cover of the group's 1987 single
Girlfriend in a Coma. A Taste of Honey was
revived by the Roundabout theatre company in New
York in 1981 with a Tony-nominated Amanda Plummer as Jo.

Delaney had a new success with her screenplay for
Dance With a Stranger (1985), based on the life
of Ruth Ellis, who was hanged in 1955 for
shooting her lover. The film was directed by Mike
Newell and starred Miranda Richardson as Ellis.
Delaney's subsequent work included the films
Three Days in August (1992) and The Railway
Station Man (1992) and the radio plays Tell Me a
Film (2003) and Country Life (2004). She was made
a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1985.

Delaney is survived by her daughter, Charlotte,
and her grandchildren, Max, Gable and Rosa.

Shelagh Delaney, playwright and scriptwriter,
born 25 November 1939; died 20 November 2011