Playwright,
screen-writer, author
Born
November 25th 1939; died November 20th 2011.
When
Shelagh Delaney, who has died of cancer aged seventy-two, saw Terence
Rattigan's play, Variations On A Theme, she was appalled, both by its
writing and by what she saw as an insensitive treatment of
homosexuality. The response of this precocious Salford-born teenager
was to pen A Taste of Honey, a play about a girl her own age who
becomes pregnant to a black sailor on a one-night stand, then moves
in to bring up the child with what would now be regarded as her gay
best
friend.
When
the play was produced in 1958 by Joan Littlewood's ground-breaking
Theatre Workshop company in London's east end, its taboo-breaking in
terms of its depiction of race, class and a sexuality that had only
just been decriminalised in England became a hit. Delaney was just
eighteen.
The play transferred to the West End, then Broadway. In 1961, Tony
Richardson's film of the play that cast Rita Tushingham alongside
original cast member Murray Melvin, who would become a regular at
Glasgow's Citizens Theatre throughout the 1970s and 1980s, became a
totem of the English new wave of post-war film and theatre that
arguably began with John Osborne's Look Back In Anger.
Where
the stage play was theatricalised with a series of Brechtian asides
to the audience, Richardson's film out of necessity shifted Delaney's
style to kitchen-sink naturalism. It was Richardson’s film,
co-scripted by Delaney, that would capture the imagination of Steven
Patrick
Morrissey, whose own childhood in Mancunian terraces echoed Delaney's
own. When Morrissey formed The Smiths, his lyrics for the
band's
debut album were fog-thick with grim-up-north romanticism.
The
opening track, Reel Around The Fountain, features lines lifted
wholesale from Delaney's play. Another song, This Night Has Opened My
Eyes, was based on the play, while photographs of Delaney graced the
covers of single, Girlfriend In A Coma and compilation, Louder Than
Bombs. Smiths single Sheila Take A Bow is believed to honour the
woman for whom Morrissey said that “at least fifty per cent of my
reason for writing can be blamed on Shelagh Delaney.”
Of
Irish descent, Shelagh Delaney was born on November 25th 1939 in
Broughton, Salford, where she first attended secondary school, a
period she described as the best education ever. Despite failing the
eleven-plus, Delaney, who had already begun writing, was transferred
to a grammar school, where she said later that she could already see
that she knew far more than the other girls there. She left aged
fifteen with five GCE O' Levels.
With
A Taste Of Honey enthusiastically accepted by Littlewood and Gerry
Raffles of Theatre Workshop, the play proved controversial, not least
for its depiction of working-class characters who were a million
miles from the cap-doffing servants presented by Rattigan and co. A
glittering career was predicted for Delaney, but a second play,
1960's The Lion In Love, was lukewarmly received in a set of reviews
described by Manchester-born novelist Jeanette Winterson, who in 2010
named
Delaney
as her hero, as 'a depressing essay in sexism'. Delaney didn't write
for the stage for another twenty years.
She
concentrated instead on a collection of short stories, Sweetly Sings
the Donkey (1963), and screen and TV plays. One, Charlie Bubbles, was
directed by Salford-born Albert Finney, who played a northern English
writer disillusioned by success enough to be unable to feel
emotionally engaged until he returns home. Another, The White Bus,
was a short for Lindsay Anderson taken from one of Delaney's stories.
It
featured a young woman who flees London drudgery for her Salford
home, where she embarks on an impressionistic open-top bus ride
through the streets. Both films appeared in 1967, and echoed the
loyalty Delaney felt to her home town.
Did
Your Nanny Come From Bergen? appeared in 1970 in the Thirty Minute
Theatre slot, while in 1974 St Martin's Summer was produced as part
of the Seven Faces of Woman series. The House That Jack Built, a 1977
vehicle for comic Duggie Brown, was later adapted for the stage, but
with
little
fanfare.
There
are echoes of Delaney's experience in that of Andrea Dunbar, another
teenage working-class writer, whose play, Rita, Sue and Bob Too, was
also turned into a film. Where Dunbar died young, Delaney simply
disappeared from view.
Radio
plays, So Does the Nightingale (1980) and Don’t Worry About Matilda
(1981) followed. While A Taste of Honey was filmed twice more, once
in 1981 for Spanish TV, and again in 1994 for a Portuguese
production, Delaney penned the screenplay for Dance With A Stranger,
Mike Newell's 1985 feature about Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be
hanged in Britain. Miranda Richardson and Rupert Everett starred.
Screenplays for Three Days in August and the Railway Station Man
followed
in 1992, while a more recent radio play, Whoopi Goldberg's Country
Life, was broadcast in 2010.
In
the 1990s, Delaney's story, Abduction, appeared in Comma, a
collection published by a Manchester-based press, and which featured
fellow Salfordian iconoclasts Mark E Smith, who originally styled his
band The Fall as defiantly northern 'white crap that talk back'; and
Tony Wilson, whose championing of the north manifested itself through
Factory Records and his TV presenting. Cultural commentators Michael
Bracewell and Paul Morley, both steeped in northern English
myth-making, also appeared. Arguably, none of these could have
existed in the same way without Delaney breaking the mould.
In
a fifteen-minute film made in 1960 by Ken Russell for BBC arts
programme, Monitor, Delaney talked of the pull of Salford, and railed
against how the rough-shod community she still lived among was being
farmed out to new housing estates and high-rises, as old Salford was
being gradually demolished. Delaney cut a vivacious, fiercely
intelligent and articulate figure. She both pre-dated and predicted
the slums immortalised in Salford-born poet John Cooper-Clarke's
Thatcher era back-street epic, Beasley Street, updated later for the
age of urban regeneration as Beasley Boulevard. Both works recognised
a shift in ambition and social mores that Delaney might have
recognised.
“People
of my age, “ she said in Russell's film of her Salford peers and
the draw of the place that existed alongside the desire to get away,
“they know what they want to do, and they're all like I was, like a
sort of horse on a tether, sort of jerking about, waiting for
somebody to cut the tether, and let me off.”
A
shorter version of this appeared in The Herald, November 22nd 2011
ends
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