Gather a bunch of writers collectively and they’ll quickly be complaining concerning the query producers inevitably pose about their tasks: “Why now?” It’s a good query, and one which must be posed when reviving a play – equivalent to Shelagh Delaney’s defining work A Style of Honey, first staged in 1958.
On its premiere, the play was a sensation. It now makes its means again to the stage on the Royal Alternate in Manchester, not removed from the place it’s set, in Delaney’s dwelling city of Salford. Fashionable audiences are warned of outdated language and attitudes to race and homosexuality, however when you have got a personality saying she’s going to “drown it” when she discovers that her white daughter might be having a black child, there must be a severe interrogation of the need of the play for at present.
Just about a two-hander between feckless mom Helen (Jill Halfpenny) and her mature-beyond-years teenage daughter, Jo (Salfordian Rowan Robinson), Delaney’s grenade into genteel Nineteen Fifties theatre will need to have appeared surprising when it was first staged. There are males within the story: one in a line of companions who discards Helen; the daddy of Jo’s child; and a homosexual pal, Geoffrey, who tries to save lots of Jo. Performed by David Moorst, Geoffrey is the one male character efficiently dragged past caricature.
Robinson’s Jo is extremely watchable, witty and sparky with a glance of metal in her eyes that sometimes fades to indicate vulnerability and concern on the state of affairs she finds herself in, pregnant by a lacking father. Halfpenny, because the mom desperately attempting to cling on, provides Helen a contact of Blanche DuBois.
When the 2 girls are “having fun with” certainly one of their slanging matches, there’s an simple frisson. Nuance is lent by directorial flashes from Emma Baggott, notably with musical punctuation from Nishla Smith reminding us we’re in a unclean previous city and a shifting metallic construction designed by Peter Butler that threatens to break down just like the lives above which it hangs. However the query stays: why now?
