Shelagh Delaney
Born (1938-11-25) November 25, 1938 (age 85) -->
Broughton, Salford, United Kingdom
DiedNovember 20, 2011(2011-11-20) (aged 72)
Suffolk, United Kingdom
LanguageEnglish
NationalityBritish
Period1958–2010
Literary movementKitchen sink realism
Notable worksA Taste of Honey, The White Bus, Charlie Bubbles, Dance With a Stranger
ChildrenCharlotte Delaney

Shelagh Delaney FRSL (25 November 1938[1] – 20 November 2011)[2] was an English dramatist and screenwriter, best known for her debut work, A Taste of Honey (1958).

Born in Broughton, Salford, Lancashire, the daughter of a bus inspector,[3] Of Irish descent, she failed the eleven plus exam four times,[4] but transferred to a grammar school at the age of fifteen from a secondary modern school, gaining five O-levels.[5] Thinking she could do better than Terence Rattigan's Variations on a Theme, a play she had seen at Manchester's Opera House[6] during its pre-West End tour,[7]

Delaney wrote her first play,[8] in ten days, partly because she felt the work showed "insensitivity in the way Rattigan portrayed homosexuals".[9] Her play was accepted by Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop. "Quite apart from its meaty content, we believe we have found a real dramatist", Gerry Raffles of Theatre Workshop said at the time.[10]

A Taste of Honey, first performed on 27 May 1958,[10] is set in her native Salford.[11]"I had strong ideas about what I wanted to see in the theatre. We used to object to plays where the factory workers came cap in hand and call the boss 'sir'. Usually North Country people are shown as gormless, whereas in actual fact, they are very alive and cynical."[12]

Reuniting the original cast,[13] the play subsequently enjoyed a run of 368 performances in the West End from January 1959;[14] it was also seen on Broadway, with Joan Plowright as Jo and Angela Lansbury as her mother.[15] It is "probably the most performed play by a post-war British woman playwright".[16]

Breaking new ground in touching on issues like homosexuality "this earthily realistic, moving story of a reluctant teenage mother-to-be ... raises issues which were later to become prime concerns of feminist writers."[17] Delaney's second play The Lion in Love followed in 1960. This work "portrays an impoverished family, whose income comes from peddling trinkets", but "the best qualities of the first play are absent."[18]

Novelist Jeanette Winterson though, has commented that the contemporary reviews of these first two plays' first performances "read like a depressing essay in sexism".[19] Sweetly Sings the Donkey, a collection of short stories, appeared in 1963.

The screenplay of the 1961 film version of A Taste of Honey, which she co-wrote with director Tony Richardson, "contrives to keep in Delaney's best lines while creating a cinematic, rather than a theatrical experience".[20] It won the BAFTA Award for Best British Screenplay and the Writers' Guild of Great Britain Award in 1962. Delaney's other screenplays include The White Bus, Charlie Bubbles (both 1967) and Dance with a Stranger (1985). She also wrote several radio plays, Tell Me a Film (2003), Country Life (2004)[15] and Whoopi Goldberg's Country Life, which was broadcast in The Afternoon Play slot on BBC Radio 4 in June 2010.[21]

In 1985, Delaney was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Death

Delaney died from breast cancer and heart failure, five days before her 73rd birthday, at the home of her daughter Charlotte in Suffolk, England.[1] She is survived by her daughter and three grandchildren.[15]

Influence on Morrissey

Delaney is cited as having been a great influence on The Smiths' lead singer and lyricist Morrissey. In 1986, Morrissey said, "I've never made any secret of the fact that at least 50 per cent of my reason for writing can be blamed on Shelagh Delaney." Many of Morrissey's lyrics were lifted directly from Delaney's plays, notably A Taste of Honey. The lyrics of The Smiths's "This Night Has Opened My Eyes" are a retelling of the plot of A Taste of Honey, using many direct quotes from the play. Morrissey chose a photo of Delaney as the artwork on the album cover for his band's 1987 compilation album, Louder Than Bombs.[22]

References

  1. ^ a b Bruce Weber "Shelagh Delaney, Author of the Play ‘A Taste of Honey’, Dies at 72", New York Times, 24 November 2011. The correct year was provided by her daughter.
  2. ^ Writer Shelagh Delaney dies at 72 at thenewstribune.com, 2011/11/21
  3. ^ Shelagh Delaney profile at FilmReference.com
  4. ^ Samantha Ellis "A Taste of Honey, London, May 1958", The Guardian, 10 September 2003
  5. ^ Shelagh Delaney's biography, The Queen's Theatre, Hornchurch
  6. ^ Michael Billington "Shelagh Delaney gave working-class women a taste of what was possible", The Guardian, 21 November 2011
  7. ^ Obituary: Shelagh Delaney, Daily Telegraph, 21 November 2011
  8. ^ James Michael Welsh, John C. Tibbetts. The Cinema of Tony Richardson, SUNY Press, 1999, p. 99
  9. ^ C. D. Innes Modern British drama: the twentieth century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 80
  10. ^ a b Yael Zarhy-Levo The Making of Theatrical Reputations, University of Iowa Press, 2008, p. 80
  11. ^ "Shelagh Delaney's Salford (1960), BFI screenonline article on Ken Russell's film, Monitor
  12. ^ Shelagh Delaney interview, 2 February 1959, Mid Century Drama, London, Faber, 1960, p. 169 as quoted in Pia Conti's "Shelagh Delaney", in Claude Lichtenstein & Thomas Schregenberger As found: the discovery of the ordinary, Springer, 2001, p. 266
  13. ^ Stephen Lacey British realist theatre: the new wave in its context 1956–1965, London: Routlege, p. 51
  14. ^ Elaine Aston and Janelle G. Reinelt The Cambridge Companion to Modern British Women Playwrights, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 41
  15. ^ a b c Dennis Barker Obituary: Shelagh Delaney, The Guardian, 21 November 2011
  16. ^ Michael Patterson The Oxford Dictionary of Plays, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 402
  17. ^ David Self "Delaney, Shelagh" in Colin Chambers (ed) The Continuum Companion to Twentieth Century Theatre, London: Continuum, 2002 [2005], p. 198
  18. ^ Christine L. Krueger, George Stade and Karen Karbiener. Encyclopedia of British Writers: 19th and 20th Centuries, Infobase Publishing, 2003, p. 104
  19. ^ Jeanette Winterson "My hero: Shelagh Delaney by Jeanette Winterson", The Guardian, 18 September 2010. See also the article by Samantha Ellis
  20. ^ Phil Wickham "Taste of Honey, A (1961)", BFI screenonline
  21. ^ The Afternoon Play: "Whoopi Goldberg's Country Life", BBC Radio 4, 18 June 2010
  22. ^ Simon Goddard Mozipedia: An Encyclopedia of Morrisey and The Smiths, Plume Books, 2010, pp. 96–99

External links

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Works by Shelagh Delaney
BAFTA Award for Best British Screenplay
Categories