TT: Getting it right the first time

Today’s Wall Street Journal drama column is devoted in its entirety to the last of my reports from Chicago, a review of Shattered Globe Theatre’s revival of Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey. Here’s an excerpt.
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Few theatrical debuts have been so startling as that of Shelagh Delaney, who wrote herself into the history of British drama with her very first play. Not only was “A Taste of Honey” a hit in London in 1959 and on Broadway a year later, but the equally successful 1961 film version is now considered to be a high point of what came to be known as the “New Wave” of British cinema. Not too shabby for a girl who was 19 years old when “A Taste of Honey” opened in the West End–but never again managed to write anything else of any consequence.
That Ms. Delaney was unable to follow up on the success of her first play undoubtedly explains why it is so much better known in England than in this country, where “A Taste of Honey” is rarely seen. The Roundabout Theatre Company brought it to Broadway in 1981 with Amanda Plummer in the lead, but I don’t know of any major productions since then, and I’d never seen the play performed until I made a trip to Chicago the other day to catch Shattered Globe Theatre’s revival. Though I’d heard good things about the company, I feared that “A Taste of Honey” would be as dated as the angry-young-man plays of John Osborne and Arnold Wesker. Not so: “A Taste of Honey” could have been written last week, and Shattered Globe’s marvelous staging has all the burning immediacy of a world premiere….
For American playgoers, “A Taste of Honey” will likely recall Clifford Odets’ “Awake and Sing,” another play about working-class urban life whose author had a pitch-perfect ear for the way plain people talk. Odets endowed the kitchen-table conversation of his Lower East Side characters with a sharp-toothed, strangely poetic quality. Ms. Delaney’s pungent dialogue has something of the same quality, only transposed into a different key: “Go and lay the table. Do something. Turn yourself into a bloody termite and crawl into the wall or something, but make yourself scarce.” But unlike Odets, she is unsentimental to the point of hardness, and at play’s end she leaves us in no doubt whatsoever that the rest of Jo’s life will be bleak and comfortless.
Helen Sadler, who plays Jo, is a find, an actress full of fire and wit who plays Jo with a gawky, angry energy that keeps you looking her way at all times. While everyone else in the ensemble is strong, my guess is that it’s Ms. Sadler whose performance you’ll be talking about on the way home. Jeremy Wechsler’s staging is as direct and unmannered as the play itself, and Kevin Hagan has designed a tenement set so seedy-looking that I briefly considered checking myself for fleas at intermission….
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Read the whole thing here.