It was after her very first journey to the theatre that 19-year-old Shelagh Delaney wrote A Style of Honey, hammered out on a borrowed typewriter after deciding she may do higher than the play she had seen on a date at Manchester’s Opera Home. Sixty-six years later, and 13 years after her dying from breast most cancers, her sparky debut is being staged half a mile away on the Royal Change, nonetheless a buying and selling submit for cotton throughout Delaney’s teenage years.
Virtually nothing is left of Delaney’s soot-stained, seedy Salford. The docks of the script at the moment are house to the BBC at Media Metropolis, with gleaming high-rises packed stuffed with worldwide college students changing the tumbledown terraces the place a promiscuous mom, Helen, abandons her teenage daughter, Jo, in a dirty bedsit.
On the floor, life has modified a lot for girls because the play premiered in 1958, when the tablet was not out there and the stigma towards single moms was so robust that orphanages have been stuffed with illegitimate kids. And but A Style of Honey nonetheless feels recent. By way of rapid-fire, humorous dialogue with hints of Victoria Wooden, it tells the story of Jo falling pregnant to Jimmy, a black sailor. When he goes off to sea, she creates one thing approaching a selected household with Geof, a homosexual man determined to be a father, who’s portrayed with out judgment at a time when homosexuality remained unlawful.
“It feels so unbelievably related,” says Jill Halfpenny, taking over the position of Helen. “They’re such outliers in the way in which they dwell, a lot on the boundary of what’s acceptable and what’s anticipated of them. The alternatives they make would nonetheless have some folks remark and switch their noses up at them as we speak.” Jo is simply 15 when she will get pregnant, a 12 months older than Halfpenny was when she received her first break as an actor, starring in Byker Grove alongside Ant and Dec, earlier than being forged in each Coronation Avenue and EastEnders.
Girls are nonetheless judged for his or her decisions, notably as moms, says director Emma Baggott. She recollects engaged on a present on the Royal Shakespeare Firm simply earlier than Covid: “I used to be the one mom within the firm. However there have been fairly just a few fathers and nobody ever commented on the truth that the fathers have been away for a protracted time period from their kids. However it was commented upon extensively that I had left my daughter – who was 14 or 15 on the time, and completely effective to be left along with her dad.”
Halfpenny, whose 15-year-old son might be house in Tynemouth through the month-long run, says she connects with Helen’s want to need extra than simply motherhood: “It’s at all times thrilling to play people who find themselves residing in a manner that perhaps all of us want we may.” Not abandoning your youngsters, she clarifies, “however being allowed to say, ‘I need one thing’ with out pondering, ‘I have to be a horrible mum.’ I believe it’s nonetheless barely frowned upon – that any individual who’s a mom may also need different issues in her life.”
Delaney as soon as described Salford as “like a horrible drug you actually maybe would wish to get away from however you’ll be able to’t.” It’s a line that resonates with Rowan Robinson, enjoying Jo. Born and bred in Salford, she left as quickly as she may, shifting to London to review at Rada, solely to return now at 22 for her first main stage position. Again residing along with her mum in Salford for the run, she says she had a sudden realisation of: “Oh my god, that is my house, these are my folks.”
Robinson feels an “immense accountability” to do Salford proud. She is worked up to play Jo, whom she describes as a “futuristic” character. Even in 2024, it’s uncommon to see a portrayal of a teenage lady who doesn’t must be favored, with the arrogance to be “unapologetically herself”, she says.
Halfpenny, now 48, understands when feminine actors complain about reaching a sure age and being sidelined to play mums and wives. However she insists that she, personally, is getting extra fascinating components than ever, partly as “so many individuals are writing higher and extra for girls”. It makes Delaney’s achievement, in creating Helen again in 1958, all of the extra spectacular. “She’s probably the most advanced folks I’ve performed.”
Halfpenny notably enjoys two ladies being centre stage, moderately than supporting characters to males. “It’s pretty to have that point on stage collectively the place you’re not simply coming in because the associate, or because the girlfriend. We’ve got boyfriends coming in. That’s nice, isn’t it?”
