A TASTE OF HONEY 21 JULY - 19 AUGUST 2018 LEARNING RESOURCES Belvoir presents A TASTE OF HONEY By SHELAGH DELANEY Directed by EAMON FLACK This production of A Taste of Honey opened at Belvoir St Theatre on Wednesday 25 July 2018. Set & Costume Designer MEL PAGE Lighting Designer DAMIEN COOPER Composer & Sound Designer STEFAN GREGORY Movement Director KATE CHAMPION Fight Coordinator NIGEL POULTON Stage Manager LUKE McGETTIGAN Assistant Stage Manager JULIA ORLANDO Directing Observer ELIZABETH NABBEN NIDA Design Secondments KELSEY LEE & ROSE MONTGOMERY With TAYLOR FERGUSON THUSO LEKWAPE GENEVIEVE LEMON JOSH McCONVILLE TOM ANSON MESKER A Taste of Honey is supported by the Nelson Meers Foundation We acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora nation who are the traditional custodians of the land on which Belvoir St Theatre is built. We also pay respect to the Elders past and present, and all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. CONTENTS About Belvoir 1 Cast and Creative Team 2 Director's Note 3 About the Writer 5 A Taste of Honey Timeline 6 Rehearsing A Taste of Honey 7 Production Elements 11 Examining the Script 15 Post Show Discussion 17 Podcast 21 Contact Education 22 Rehearsal & Production Photos / Brett Boardman 2018 Cover Image / Daniel Boud 2017 Learning Resources compiled by Belvoir’ Education, July 2018 ABOUT BELVOIR One building. Six hundred people. Thousands of stories. When the Nimrod Theatre building in Belvoir Street, Surry Hills, was threatened with redevelopment in 1984, more than 600 people – ardent theatre lovers together with arts, entertainment and media professionals – formed a syndicate to buy the building and save this unique performance space in inner city Sydney. Thirty years later, under Artistic Director Eamon Flack and Executive Director Sue Donnelly, Belvoir engages Australia’s most prominent and promising playwrights, directors, actors and designers to realise an annual season of work that is dynamic, challenging and visionary. As well as performing at home, Belvoir regularly takes to the road, touring both nationally and internationally. Belvoir Education Our Education Program provides students and teachers with insights into the work of Belvoir and first hand experiences of the theatre-making process. Belvoir Education offers student workshops, teacher professional development workshops, work experience, VET placements, archival viewings and a wealth of online resources designed to support work in the drama classroom. Our arts access programs assist schools in Regional NSW and Western Sydney to access the company’s work. Explore our education pages at www.belvoir.com.au/education 1 CAST AND CREATIVE TEAM Eamon Flack Kate Champion Damien Cooper Taylor Ferguson Stefan Gregory Director Movement Director Lighting Designer Jo Composer & Sound Designer Thuso Lekwape Genevieve Lemon Josh McConville Luke McGettigan Tom Anson Mesker Jimmie Helen Peter Stage Manager Geoffrey Julia Orlando Mel Page Assistant Stage Set & Costume Manager Designer 2 DIRECTOR'S NOTE: EAMON FLACK Shelagh Delaney, who grew up poor in the middle of England in the middle of the 20th century, wrote this play when she was 19. The way she tells it, a young man took her to a play at the Opera House in Manchester, “and I came away after the performance having suddenly realised that at last after nineteen years of life I had discovered something that meant more to me than myself.” She borrowed a typewriter and “set to and produced this little epic.” Then she sent it to the great Joan Littlewood. Littlewood was a director, writer, actor, producer. I’ll go out on a limb and make a bold claim: English theatre owes its ongoing vitality to Littlewood. While waves of Oxbridge men forged the modern orthodoxy of British theatre at the big institutional theatres in London in the second half of the 20th century, Littlewood cultivated a vigorous heterodox tradition outside the capital. While the orthodoxy was authored, literary, often establishmentarian even when it wasn’t, Littlewood’s work was collaborative, communal, unstuffy, demotic, naughty, a little wild. She and her artists looked to music hall and the street, they improvised, mucked up, slept where they worked. She made theatre from life. Ever since, almost any time English theatre has started to bung itself up with its own importance, the alternative tradition that Littlewood championed has sprung to its salvation. So when Delaney sent her play to Littlewood, she wasn’t mucking around. Littlewood clearly recognised an original voice; even Delaney’s cover letter rang out with self-declared newness*: “…no matter what sort of theatrical atrocity [this play] might be, it isn’t valueless so far as I’m concerned... I know nothing, have nothing - except a willingness to learn - and intelligence.” Littlewood took up the challenge, led Delaney and the play through a pretty thorough rejig, and gave it a resounding first production, with a jazz band on stage, and danced transitions. It transferred to the West End. Dozens of international productions followed. A film. The Beatles and The Smiths wrote songs with lyrics taken from the play. It was a legendary beginning. *You can find the letter online – it’s worth googling. What have we talked about as we’ve made this production, the first in Australia for maybe 40 years? We’ve talked about choice. How many other different Jos could Jo have been? How much power does she have over her own life? Where do her choices lie? When does she get to take control? What choice did Helen ever have? Is it too late to start again now? How many goes do you get at life? We’ve talked about change, history. That it’s not always public, legislated, protested for. Sometime history is made sitting on the toilet, or in the midst of a messy scrap between a mother and a daughter, in a dank room held together by layers of paint in an overlooked corner of the city. History is difficult sex, personal grief, wishful thinking, instinct, accident, rage, recklessness, awkwardness. The future is made on the low, lonely level in any nook and corner of life. This is especially true of the struggle for liberation and equality- the struggle to be allowed to make something of yourself. We’ve talked a lot about copying and taking on roles. Copying other people is a deep part of life. We’ve been happy and lucky to have Agnes Page in our rehearsal room. Agnes is nine months old, the daughter of our designers Mel Page and Stef Gregory. Agnes copies. You can see the mirror neurones firing away like an electrical storm. That process never ends. Sometimes you can look at the world around you and see yourself, and know how to live. You watch and copy. But sometimes you look at the world around you and there’s no sign of you. Then what do you do? What if no one else is like you? What if you’re a bit wrong, a bit daft? How do you learn what action to take, what choice to make, if you’re nowhere to be found? People who can’t find 3 other people to copy, roles to inhabit, will die or break apart. Every one of the people in the play needs to find a reflection somewhere, from someone, in drink, in sex, in art, in fooling about, in the daily grind, or they’ll break or die. I guess the aim of a good society is to make sure that everyone can find themselves in it somewhere; that we all have a role to play; and that that role is not a lie. If there isn't a role for you, then there is one other choice than death or disintegration. You can stake a claim to your originality. Being a bit wrong, a bit daft, is a precarious position to be in, but if you play it right you can turn wrong into something new. A new way of life. A new role. Something that other daft people might find their place in. You might be able to break in a new form, and make some history. Littlewood did it. Delaney did with this play. Does Jo? Eamon Flack 4 ABOUT THE WRITER: SHELAH DELANEY Shelagh was born on 25 November, 1938 in Broughton, Salford, Lancashire and died from cancer on 20 November, 2011, at the home of her daughter Charlotte, in Suffolk. This year marks the 60th anniversary of A Taste of Honey, which Shelagh wrote in just two weeks at the age of 19. A Taste of Honey is the play for which she is most well-known, however it belies the extraordinary talent of this writer who was a trailblazer in terms of literary style, content and form. Shelagh was one of the leading voices of ‘kitchen-sink’ realism, and a transformative voice in the theatre of the 1950s and 1960s, shining the light on lower-class women and minorities who were, until this point, relegated to “comic relief” or second-tier storylines. Delaney’s fearless determination to feature them in starring roles made her one of the most daring writers of the time. While A Taste of Honey was a resounding success, with a major award-winning film produced just a couple of years after the play’s West-End debut, for some years afterwards, critics compared all her other works to A Taste of Honey and she was labelled a "one-hit-wonder". However, as renowned author Jeanette Winterson noted, “I read the patronising down-grades of what she achieved. Who else, in 1958, was writing about an unmarried pregnant teenager, her gay friend, a gentle sexy black sailor, and a single mother?...Shelagh Delaney deserves a major re-write in all those histories of post-war drama because Shelagh Delaney is the start of the possible”.