John Osborne seeking ugly girl for ‘Taste Of Honey’ ran a
headline in the Daily Express of March 2nd 1960—referring
to the upcoming Woodfall adaptation of Shelagh Delaney’s
groundbreaking 1958 play about a gawky Salford teenager. The
Express story was spotted by a 17-year-old Liverpudlian lass
working at one of the city’s theatres—first step on a breathtaking
journey that would, two years later, see big-screen newcomer
Rita Tushingham land a Golden Globe and become the first
Briton to be named Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival.
The Croisette was a busy place in 1962, with no fewer than 35 titles up for the
awards—in a competition assessed by a 16-person jury that included a 30-year-old
François Truffaut. Indeed, A Taste of Honey, now firmly established in the United
Kingdom cinematic canon (it ranked 56th in the BFI’s 1999 poll), has sometimes been
labelled a distaff, cross-channel cousin of Truffaut’s own enduringly influential The
400 Blows (1959).
The two films made a huge impact by adopting radical, audacious techniques to
intimately dramatise the coming-of-age of a troubled teenager: Jean-Pierre Léaud as
Antoine Doinel for Truffaut; for director/co-writer Richardson, Tushingham as Jo, who
is forced to grow up fast after becoming pregnant following a brief affair with a sailor.
Richardson collaborated on the screenplay with Delaney, who was herself only 19
when A Taste of Honey premiered on the London stage in 1958.
In the manner of Osborne with Look Back In Anger, the precocious Salfordian
playwright was determined to get very far away from the genteel, upper-middle class
milieu of then-fashionable figures such as Terence Rattigan. She was particularly
incensed by the “insensitivity” with which Rattigan portrayed homosexuality—thus
creating the figure of Geoffrey, who plays a crucial, nurturingly sympathetic role in Jo
achieving independence from her blowsy, brassy force-of-nature mother, Helen.
Murray Melvin played Geoffrey opposite Frances Cuka (Jo) and Avis Bunnage (Helen)
in the original stage version and retained the role in Richardson’s adaptation, stealing
scenes with his feline grace, his trained-dancer’s physical self-possession and mordant
wit: “My ‘usual’ self is a very unusual self,” he quips at one point. Melvin would
eventually join Tushingham on that Cannes roll of honour, for a role which is generally
accepted as the first openly gay major character in a mainstream British production.
The fact that Jo’s seafaring paramour (played by half-Ghanaian future barrister Paul
Danquah) happened to be black similarly challenged long-standing taboos.
A TASTE OF HONEY
“Everything’s seen at its best
in the dark.”
Helen (Dora Bryan)
1
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