Taste of Honey

Shelagh Delaney (1938 - 2011) was born in Salford, Lancashire, in 1938. She is most well-known for A Taste of Honey (1958), for which she won the Foyle's New Play Award and the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award. She wrote the screenplay for the film version with Tony Richardson and received the British Film Academy Award and the Robert Flaherty Award. Her other screenplays include The White Bus and Charley Bubbles, for which she won the Writers' Guild Award. She also wrote for television and radio and published a collection of short stories. She died in 2011.Hannah Simpson is Lecturer in Drama and Performance in the English Faculty at the University of Edinburgh, UK. She is the author of Samuel Beckett and the Theatre of the Witness: Pain in Post-War Francophone Drama (2022) and Samuel Beckett and Disability Performance (2022). She has edited special issues for Twentieth Century Literature, Medical Humanities and the Journal of War and Culture Studies, and is co-editor of the Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Disability book series.

• Chronology IntroductionHistorical, Social and Cultural Contexts1950s BritainAngry Young MenGenres and ThemesClass and Kitchen-Sink RealismWomenRaceQueer IdentityPlay as PerformanceProduction HistoryFurther ReadingA TASTE OF HONEYNotes

The contextual commentary ... is a useful exploration of the play's meaning covering historical, social and cultural contexts, class and realism, the portrayal of women, race, queer identity and the text in performance.