A Taste of Honey

Jo materialized out of a five-minute affair on a haystack. Her father is dead. Her mother, more feverish at lovemaking than at housekeeping, traipses around with an alcoholic salesman. So Jo takes a lover. Unfortunately she chooses a sailor. She winds up without a husband, with child.

A Taste of Honey may sound like a documentary on wayward little people in the big city. But it's not that grim. Shelagh Delaney brings everybody on and off-stage to music. She cuts out hunks of time -- scenes glid into each other instead of stumbling along in supra-realistic connection. The characters are an articulate crew; they put each other down without stuttering. Their bitchy banter is as satisfying as a good dogfight.

I liked everybody in the Ex production. In fact, as I left, I congratulated myself for meeting people so healthy and pleasant.

But those pleasant people were terribly miscast. Jo is what we want to be when we're kids. She's not offensively fresh (she doesn't alienate the world in the proces). But she is effective (she insults the grown-ups enough to hold her own place). Noelle Caskey seemed more put-upon than pushy. She played a snubnosed sweetie.

Karen Leslie (Helen) presented a vaudeville version of a whore. She rolled her eyes, knocked her knees, travelled from corner to corner like frantic lizard. She was too flashy to be forty. And she never indicated that in spite of their daily bickering matches, a bond exists between mother and daughter.

Leslie Hurley, the director, played the short-term Nogro lover. He lacked bravado, Anthony Mowbray's advances weren't assertive enough to have originated in the salesman's one-track mind. Charles Nichols (Geof) just was not a homosexual handmaid.

The cast's biggest problem was dealing with London's foreign language. Sometimes an actor concentrated so hard on dropping an 'h' or putting in an 'aye' that his whole line came out meaning only, "I wish I were English!" And voices invariably slipped into Cambridgeese after an arduous cockney spurt. Why didn't Hurley pick something original and indigenous? Then his cast could have projected emotions instead of taking an Eliza Doolittle lesson in reverse.

The lighting was straight, and the set (a platform surrounded by three sides of seats) was adequate. I'd praise both more if I could praise the rest.