A New Reality

Focussing on the crucial transitional year of 1958, Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey offers a valuable and often overlooked contribution to the genre of ‘kitchen sink drama’. Nevertheless, as Maria Elena Capitani demonstrates, Delaney surpasses her ‘angry young male’ counterparts in her exploration of more of the preoccupations of the 1960s including homosexuality, mixed-race sex, teenage pregnancy and the survival techniques of an ‘underclass’. Capitani observes how A Taste of Honey has the unique capacity to register an epoch-defining moment in British social and cultural history at the same time as it expresses the ‘suffering of ambivalence’, to use Adrienne Rich’s term, of motherhood.