Modern text: A Taste of Honey — AQA GCSE English Literature Revision Notes

What you'll learn

• How Delaney structures the play across two acts and a year of Jo's life
• Jo and Helen's relationship, and why it is the play's real subject
• Jimmie and Geof as the two men who treat Jo well, and what happens to both
• How the play handles class, race and sexuality at a moment when all three were rarely staged
• The kitchen sink movement, Theatre Workshop, and the 1958 context
• How to approach the AQA Paper 2 modern texts question, where no extract is given

Key terms and definitions

Kitchen sink drama — a British movement of the late 1950s staging working-class life in ordinary domestic settings, in place of middle-class drawing-room comedy.

Social realism — art depicting everyday life, particularly of the poor, without romanticising it.

Direct address — characters speaking to the audience, breaking the illusion of a sealed world. Delaney uses it throughout.

Brechtian technique — devices reminding an audience it is watching a play: music, direct address, an unconcealed set. Joan Littlewood's production added several.

Naturalism — drama attempting to reproduce real speech and behaviour exactly. The play is close to it, but the direct address breaks with it deliberately.

Bildungsroman — a story of growing up. The play covers roughly a year of Jo's development.

Stage directions — the playwright's instructions on setting, movement and delivery; important evidence in this text.

Episodic structure — a play built from separate scenes rather than continuous action.

Core concepts

Structure and story

The play covers about a year and is written in two acts of two scenes each.

Act 1 opens with Helen and her daughter Jo moving into a shabby flat in Salford — the latest in a long series of moves. Their relationship is immediately combative: they speak to each other like rivals rather than mother and child. Helen's younger boyfriend Peter arrives; he is brash and has money. Jo meets a Black sailor, and over a brief period they become close; he gives her a ring and proposes before his ship leaves. Helen marries Peter and moves out, leaving Jo alone at Christmas.

Act 2 begins months later. Jo is pregnant and has left school, working in a bar. Geof, a gay art student who has been thrown out of his lodgings, moves in with her and takes over the domestic work — cleaning, cooking, preparing for the baby. Their arrangement is the most functional relationship in the play. Helen returns after Peter leaves her, immediately reasserts control, and Geof quietly goes. The play ends with Jo alone again, singing a children's rhyme, Helen having gone out for a drink.

The circularity is the point. Jo ends as she began: in a cold flat, abandoned by her mother, about to repeat the pattern with a child of her own.

Jo and Helen

The mother–daughter relationship is the play's centre and its most original achievement.

Helen is a semi-alcoholic, self-described good-time girl in her late thirties who has moved constantly, drunk steadily, and put every man ahead of her daughter. She is also funny, quick and entirely unsentimental, and Delaney refuses to make her simply a bad mother. She is trying to survive on very little, and what she does for herself she does because nobody else will.

Jo is seventeen, sharp, artistic and unwanted. She has been dragged through a dozen schools, has no friends, and has learned her mother's defensive wit. Her longing for affection drives every relationship she forms.

They communicate almost entirely through insult. Delaney gives them a shared vocabulary of mockery that functions as their only available form of intimacy — they cannot be tender, so they are funny at each other's expense. The moments when either drops the manner are rare and immediately retreated from.

Helen's abandonment of Jo at Christmas and her displacement of Geof at the end are the two decisions that shape the play, and both are made casually.

Jimmie

Jo's boyfriend is a Black naval rating, and Delaney's treatment of him was genuinely unusual for 1958.

He is kind, funny and straightforward — the relationship is warm, mutual and almost entirely free of the aggression that characterises every other exchange in the play. He proposes, gives her a ring, and leaves with his ship.

Delaney handles the racism around him obliquely but unmistakably. Helen's reaction to learning the baby's father is Black is the play's ugliest moment, and Jo herself repeats some of the language she has grown up with. The play does not present Jo as free of the prejudice around her.

He does not return, and the play does not explain why. His absence is treated as ordinary rather than tragic — one more person who leaves.

For exam purposes, note that he is often listed simply as "the boy" in the text, and that his relative lack of stage time is itself worth discussing: the play gives him warmth and denies him presence.

Geof

Geof is the play's most sympathetic character and, for 1958, its most daring.

He is a gay art student, thrown out of his lodgings, and the play treats his sexuality as an ordinary fact rather than as a subject requiring resolution. He is gentle, practical and domestic — he cleans, he makes curtains, he buys a doll to prepare Jo for motherhood.

He and Jo form something the play values more than any romance in it: a household of two people nobody else wants, functioning on affection rather than need. Jo is affectionate and also casually cruel to him, using the same mocking register she learned from Helen.

Helen removes him without argument the moment she returns, and he leaves without a fight. That he has no standing to stay — no legal, social or familial claim — is the point Delaney is making about how such arrangements were regarded.

Writing about Geof rewards noting that homosexuality was a criminal offence in England until 1967, nine years after the play opened, which makes his unremarked presence on a mainstream stage genuinely significant.

Themes

Motherhood is examined without sentiment. Helen has failed Jo; Jo expects to fail her own child and says so. Delaney refuses the reconciliation an audience might want, and Jo's final position — alone, pregnant, singing a nursery rhyme — suggests the pattern will continue.

Class and poverty are the background to every decision. The flat is cold and damp, Jo leaves school for a bar job, and money determines who can afford to leave and who cannot. Helen's escape route is marriage; Jo's is unavailable.

Loneliness and abandonment structure the plot. Everyone Jo loves leaves: Jimmie with his ship, Helen with Peter, Geof at Helen's insistence.

Race enters through Jimmie and through the reactions to him. Delaney stages ordinary domestic racism rather than dramatic confrontation.

Sexuality runs through Geof and through Jo's uncertainty about what she wants from him. The play is notably relaxed about it.

Female independence is the question underneath everything. Neither woman can support herself adequately, and both are therefore dependent on men who are unreliable.

Context

Shelagh Delaney was nineteen when she wrote the play, reportedly after seeing a Terence Rattigan production and deciding she could write something truer about the life she knew. That biographical fact matters because the play's freshness comes from its refusal of theatrical convention.

Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop staged it in 1958 at the Theatre Royal Stratford East. Littlewood's production added a live jazz band and encouraged direct address to the audience, which is why the published text contains Brechtian elements that sit oddly with its naturalistic dialogue.

The kitchen sink movement was underway — Osborne's Look Back in Anger had opened in 1956 — but Delaney was unusual in it: a young working-class woman writing about women, when the movement was dominated by angry young men.

Salford and the industrial north are specific rather than generic. The play is rooted in a particular city in decline.

Homosexuality was illegal until the Sexual Offences Act 1967. Staging a sympathetic gay character in 1958 was a real risk, and the Lord Chamberlain still censored plays until 1968.

Unmarried motherhood carried heavy stigma, abortion was illegal until 1967, and an interracial relationship producing a child would have attracted considerable hostility. Every one of Jo's difficulties has a legal and social dimension the modern reader has to be told about.

Worked examples

Example 1: Character question

How does Delaney present the relationship between Jo and Helen?

Organise around their manner of speaking rather than around events. Establish that they communicate through mockery, and that this is the only intimacy available to them. Then track the two abandonments — Christmas and the ending — and note that both are casual rather than cruel. Use Helen's own history to argue that Delaney presents her as a product of her circumstances rather than a villain. Conclude on the circular ending and the likelihood that Jo repeats the pattern.

Example 2: Theme question

How does Delaney explore ideas about belonging in the play?

Build the answer around the household Jo and Geof create — the only functional home in the play, made by two people with nowhere else to go. Set it against Helen's marriage, which is transactional, and Jimmie's departure, which is structural rather than personal. Then show how easily the Jo–Geof arrangement is dismantled, and argue that Delaney is making a point about which relationships society recognises and which it does not.

Example 3: Writing without an extract

The modern texts question supplies no extract, so recall must be precise. Learn a small number of short quotations from your own copy of the play — a few lines each for Jo, Helen and Geof, plus two or three stage directions. Where exact wording escapes you, refer confidently to the moment instead; examiners credit accurate reference, and an approximate quotation inside quotation marks costs more than it gains.

Common mistakes and how to avoid them

Treating Helen as simply a bad mother. Delaney gives her wit, poverty and no alternatives. The play resists that judgement.

Ignoring the direct address. Characters speak to the audience, which breaks naturalism deliberately. Naming that as a technique is easy AO2 credit most answers miss.

Underplaying the 1958 context. Homosexuality illegal, abortion illegal, unmarried motherhood stigmatised, interracial relationships rare on stage — the play's ordinariness about all four is what made it remarkable.

Reading the ending as hopeful. Jo is alone and singing a children's rhyme. The circularity is deliberate.

Forgetting Jimmie. His warmth contrasts with everything else in the play, and the reactions to him carry the race material.

Skipping the stage directions. This is a play, and the set, the music and the movement are all evidence.

Exam technique for "Modern text: A Taste of Honey"

On AQA Paper 2 the modern texts question is worth 30 marks plus 4 for AO4, and you should spend about 45 minutes on it. You choose one question from two, so read both before committing.

Plan for five minutes. Three or four developed points, each anchored to a specific scene, with one reserved for staging or structure.

Write about Delaney making choices for an audience: "Delaney has Jo address the audience directly so that" is analysis; "Jo talks to us" is description.

Because there is no extract, know where scenes sit in the two acts and who is present.

Keep four minutes at the end for spelling and punctuation, which carry marks on this question.

Quick revision summary

• Two acts, about a year, in a shabby Salford flat — Jo ends alone as she began
• Jo and Helen communicate through mockery because tenderness is unavailable to them
• Helen abandons Jo twice: at Christmas for Peter, and at the end by displacing Geof
• Jimmie is warm and straightforward, leaves with his ship, and Helen's reaction to the baby's father is the play's ugliest moment
• Geof is gay, gentle and domestic, and creates the only functional home in the play — then leaves without a claim to stay
• Themes: motherhood without sentiment, poverty, abandonment, race, sexuality, female dependence
• Context: Delaney was 19; Theatre Workshop 1958; homosexuality illegal until 1967; abortion illegal; the Lord Chamberlain still censoring
• Kitchen sink realism, but written by a young working-class woman about women
• Paper 2, roughly 45 minutes, 30 marks + 4 for AO4, no extract — learn quotations from your own copy