Tart Humor and Rowdy Farrago
SHIPLEY, JOSEPH T.
On STAGE By Joseph T. Shipley Tart Humor and Rowdy Farrago A Taste of Honey. By Shelagh Delaney. Directed by Tony Richardson and George Devine. Presented by David Merrick. At the Lyceum...
...In the first part, we see the girl with the sailor...
...The soldier dies, but the actor who is playing him hops up and proceeds to harangue the audience...
...Perhaps Behan wants us to feel, beneath this callow and crass rebelliousness, a deeper dissatisfaction with the ways of our workaday world...
...The Hostage...
...Life is not ipso facto art...
...One actor wishes that another would stop his shenanigans, so that the play can go on—but the play really hasn't any place to go...
...I suppose all this comes under the name of realism, and if realism means that such things have happened, probably the term may be accurately applied...
...I'm agin' it," the characters, nostalgic for the Revolution, seem to hate anyone in power...
...Although Helen manages to marry most of her boy friends, she neglected the ceremony with the one that gave her Josephine, which adds to the daughter's sense of not "belonging...
...But fact does not necessarily make fiction...
...Their efforts thus give us separate well-handled moments, but emphasize the eccentricities and aberrancies of the individual story, without any of the universality, or of the exaltation, of art...
...A sort of tart humor rises from the mother's relations with the casual Peter, who marries her and deserts her with equal nonchalance...
...Working on the Irish principle...
...in Lancaster, England...
...in his embrace, as the curtain falls...
...Binding these episodes together is Josephine's mother, the always responsive but wholly irresponsible Helen...
...It succeeds in entertaining them...
...The London Theatre Workshop Production...
...The story of her play is briefly told...
...Robert Louis Stevenson observed that when he read something that sounded impossible, he was sure it was a transcript from life...
...And in a final happy-go-haywire shooting-match the English soldier is accidentally, unintentionally killed...
...Presented by Leonard S. Field and Caroline Burke Swann...
...Directed by Joan Littlewood...
...the Irish capture an English soldier and bring him to the brothel and if their man dies, this one will also...
...The talk, often breaking into song, is punctuated less by obscenity than by blasphemy, but State as well as Church is roundly drubbed...
...The dramatic interest is split by the plot division...
...the three men in the cast play along...
...The story is meager: The English are to kill an Irishman next morning...
...The rebellion even reaches out against stage conventions and from time to time a character turns around to talk to the audience...
...If there's a government...
...Joan Plowright is tense as the girl: Angela Lansbury flighty as her mother...
...The first "shock" is the location...
...By Brendan Behan...
...Pregnant by him in the second part, she alternately quarrels with and is tender toward the young homosexual who cares for her, whose motherly instincts surround her with such comforts as he can devise and afford...
...A lonely girl, alternately fussed over and forsaken by her "floozy" mother, is drawn to and sleeps with a Negro sailor...
...Behan sets all his action in a Dublin bawdy house, a queer place inhabited by pious prostitutes (a Holy Roller, praying whore...
...she falls back on the bed...
...First we watch the white Josephine kissing the Negro sailor...
...A TASTE OF HONEY in a pot of gall is what the 19-year-old Shelagh Delaney offers those that go with her, onstage, to the town of Salford...
...But these intimations are drowned under the barrage of loud impiety and scorn of institutions...
...At the Lyceum Theatre...
...During her pregnancy, as the sailor does not come back, she is helped by a sisterly sort of fellow— whorn the mother drives away, leaving the girl lonelier than ever, on the brink of the birth of her black man's child...
...Perhaps our conventional morality is too much of a sham for us any longer to feel shame...
...A rowdy farrago of rebellion, with slapstick humor and bawdy irreverence, it strikes out at all established things and attempts, like the diabolists of 19th-century France but with more Irish swagger and adolescent bravado, to shock the middle class...
...The "honey" is in a song the Negro sang...
...A Taste of Honey, like much else in the theater today, gives a vivid picture of a distasteful situation, too unusual to be representative, too sordid to be satisfying, too discrete, too grimy, to be art...
...At the Cort Theatre...
...prinked homosexuals (including an American Negro prizefighter dressed in kilts), and an innocent young girl who makes the beds until she lies on one with the English soldier...
...in the second part, in quite a different relationship with the boy...
...But the tensions of the play are within Josephine, the one figure who takes life solemnly, and consequently the one battered by life...
...Another importation from England, "bad boy" Brendan Behan's The Hostage, opened while Marshal Tito was here and I was in Yugoslavia...
...Merely to have happened makes a case-history, perhaps, but not a play...
Vol. 43 • November 1960 • No. 44
