[This entry was updated by Susan Whitehead from her entry in the Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography, volume 8, pp. 55--60.]

After seeing the first production of Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey in May 1958, Lindsay Anderson said of the play in Encore: "To talk as we do about new working-class audiences, about plays that will interpret the common experiences of today—all this is one thing and a good thing too. But how much better even, how much more exciting, to find such theatre suddenly here, suddenly sprung up under our feet!" He went on to call A Taste of Honey "A work of complete, exhilarating originality" which "has all the strength and none of the weaknesses of a pronounced, authentic local accent" and proclaimed it "a real escape from the middle-brow, middle-class vacuum of the West End." His view was shared by many critics, and although...