Skip to main content

A Taste of Honey

King’s Theatre
Three stars

Shelagh Delaney’s precocious taboo-busting soap opera was always more theatrical than Tony Richardson’s kitchen-sink film version gave it credit for after Joan Littlewood’s original production appeared in 1958. So it goes in Bijan Sheibani’s five-year-old National Theatre production, recast for its current tour, and introduced by pianist David O’Brien’s jazz trio doing an impressive turn as the sort of combo permanently in residence at northern English basement dives of the post war era.  

They’re the sort of places Jo’s mum Helen knows well. This is clear by the way Jodie Prenger as Helen leans against the piano as if adorning a pulp fiction paperback, a bottle-blonde would-be diva who wields a lipstick-stained cigarette like a weapon that could stab your eyes out. Gemma Dobson’s Josephine may be able to namedrop the classics, but she and Helen spark off each other with the sort of lacerating love/hate exchanges that binds their spiky and self-destructive relationship like a more feral template for Eddi and Saffy in Absolutely Fabulous.

Set solely in Helen and Jo’s latest fly-by-night flea-pit, Hildegard Bechtler’s elaborate set allows Jo to hold court as the host of a Saturday night variety show might, so each scene is more or less a dramatic duet, first between Jo and Helen before Tom Varey’s boozed-up spiv Peter shows up. Jo’s doomed dalliance with Durone Stokes’ sailor Jimmie subsequently gives way to another kind of domestic bliss with Jo’s gay best friend, Geoffrey, played by Stuart Thompson.

There’s a musicality to Sheibani’s production that goes beyond Benjamin Kwasi Burrell’s live score, with each character having something akin to a theme song. For Geoffrey it’s Mad About The Boy, while Jimmie does a mean doo-wop version of Burns’ My Love is Like a Red Red Rose. While never overplayed by Prenger, Helen’s early asides point up what is structured more like a set of vaudevillian turns punctuated by Delaney’s ricocheting dialogue that goes some way to prove it’s not always grim up north.

The Herald, September 25th 2019

ends




Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) ...

Myra Mcfadyen - An Obituary

Myra McFadyen – Actress   Born January 12th 1956; died October 18th 2024   Myra McFadyen, who has died aged 68, was an actress who brought a mercurial mix of lightness and depth to her work on stage and screen. Playwright and artistic director of the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, David Greig, called McFadyen “an utterly transformative, shamanic actor who could change a room and command an audience with a blink”. Citizens’ Theatre artistic director Dominic Hill described McFadyen’s portrayal of Puck in his 2019 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre in London as “funny, mischievous and ultimately heartbreaking.”   For many, McFadyen will be most recognisable from Mamma Mia!, the smash hit musical based around ABBA songs. McFadyen spent two years on the West End in Phyllida Lloyd’s original 1999 stage production, and was in both film offshoots. Other big screen turns included Rob Roy (1995) and Our Ladies (2019), both directed by Mi...

The Passage – Hip Rebel Degenerates: Black, White and Red All Over

Prelude – The Power of Three   Fear. Power. Love. This life-and-death (un)holy trinity was the driving force and raisons d’être of The Passage, the still largely unsung Manchester band sired in what we now call the post-punk era, and who between 1978 and 1983 released four albums and a handful of singles.    Led primarily by composer Dick Witts, The Passage bridged the divide between contemporary classical composition and electronic pop as much as between the personal and the political. In the oppositional hotbed of Margaret Thatcher’s first landslide, The Passage fused agit-prop and angst, and released a song called Troops Out as a single. The song offered unequivocal support for withdrawing British troops from Northern Ireland.    They wrote Anderton’s Hall, about Greater Manchester’s born again right wing police chief, James Anderton, and, on Dark Times, rubbed Brechtian polemic up against dancefloor hedonism. On XOYO, their most commercial and potentially mo...