A Taste of Honey

There seems initially little honey to taste in the slum lives of this young mother and her teenage daughter in 1950’s working class England.  Shelagh Delaney wrote the hit play (and later film) when she was just 19.

Yet the honey is in the women’s underlying exuberance, the humour in their flawed males and a 50’s soundtrack which blows away cobwebs.

Director Eamon Flack elevates these theatrical qualities but A Taste of Honey still remains an odd choice for Belvoir. It’s unconvincingly reborn in 1950’s Sydney; yet it still carries the fog, clamour and prejudice of its English setting – that sense of kitchen-sink place is the play’s great strength.

Despite hovering between hemispheres, the cast is good, lead by the bounteous Genevieve Lemon who’s more a man-hunting showgirl than a mother.  Although a comic treat, Lemon is a couple of decades too old for the role, since the play’s nub is the competition between a young mother and her daughter. 

Taylor Fergusson is her abandoned daughter, Jo, all teenage angst and mania, and oddly unappealing.   

She follows her mother’s path, into a teenage pregnancy, thanks to a gentle black sailor, played authentically by Thuso Lekwape.  And with Jo’s new homely gay friend (Tom Anson Mesker) and the drunk lover who threatens her Mum (Josh McConville), there’s plenty of social issues suggested, even if circa 1950s.   

Kate Champion’s dance movement provides a welcome abstraction to the play’s sometimes stilted action and dialogue, confined on Mel Page’s elevated set of a slum apartment.

Martin Portus

Photographer: Brett Boardman