The Story: Act One
Before you can perform or design a single moment of A Taste of Honey, you need the whole story in your head — because the exam paper prints one extract and expects you to place it inside everything else. Delaney sets her entire play inside a composite set: one flat and the street outside, used for the whole play without changing. This lesson walks through Act One scene by scene, turning each moment into a stock of performer and designer choices you can use in the exam.
The play has two acts, each split into two scenes — four scenes in total, with no fifth scene and no separate narrator to guide the audience. Act One Scene One is set entirely inside the new flat; Act One Scene Two begins in the street, moves into the flat, then jumps forward in time to Helen’s wedding day. Holding this shape in your head means you will never confuse an extract’s placement in the exam.
Act One has two scenes. Scene One takes place entirely inside the new flat that Helen and Jo move into. Scene Two begins in the street, returns to the flat, then time-jumps forward to Helen’s wedding day. There is no fifth scene.
Scene One: A Comfortless Flat
Helen and her seventeen-year-old daughter Jo arrive at a run-down flat carrying their belongings, and Jo complains immediately about the state of it. Helen’s reply is blunt: the rent is all she can afford. Delaney’s opening stage direction gives only a comfortless flat and the street outside, leaving designers a great deal of freedom. The details come out through the scene itself: no working heating, a leaking roof, one bed to share, a view over a slaughterhouse and a tugboat horn that places them near the river. A designer building this world should let every prop and light state communicate poverty and cold, not just a Manchester or Salford postcode.
Jo tries to shade a harsh, bare light bulb and burns her hand; she struggles with the gas stove. Then she unpacks a set of flower bulbs, planning a window box: “I’m going to unpack my bulbs. I wonder where I can put them.” Track this moment carefully — it is a motif Delaney brings back in Act Two, when the bulbs are found still unplanted — so a performer playing Jo here should plant real hope and domestic ambition in the line, not throwaway business.
Helen finds Jo’s self-portraits and both mocks and half-praises them in the same breath, asking whether Jo has ever considered a proper art school — Jo refuses outright. Jo also lets slip that she once thought she loved one of Helen’s men, who hurt her. This short exchange establishes the mother-daughter pattern the whole play runs on: affection offered and immediately withdrawn.
Peter Smith, a car salesman who wears an eye patch after losing an eye on war service, arrives looking for Helen. He flirts with her and proposes marriage on the spot.
Helen does not accept Peter’s proposal straight away in Scene One. She gives him no clear answer in the moment, and only admits to Jo, later in the same scene, that she is considering it. The engagement itself is not announced until Scene Two.
Take the moment Jo shivers and argues with Helen about the heating. As a designer, you might light the scene with a single low-wattage practical lamp and a cold, thin general wash in pale blue-grey, so that the actors’ breath and posture do the work of showing the cold rather than any special effect. A sound designer could add a distant tugboat horn and the low hum of the slaughterhouse’s machinery bleeding in through a poorly fitted window, reminding the audience constantly of where this family has landed.
As a performer playing Jo, you could physicalise the cold through tight, defensive body language — arms wrapped across the body, weight held on the balls of the feet, voice pitched slightly higher and faster than usual to show irritation held just under control. Playing Helen, a slower, heavier physicality and a flatter, more resigned vocal tone shows a woman worn down by repeating this same argument in flat after flat.
Scene Two: The Street, the Flat, the Wedding Day
Scene Two opens in the street, where Jo walks home with Jimmie, a young Black sailor in the Royal Navy who has surprised her by meeting her from school. He kisses her; Jo says she likes it but does not want constant kissing. Jimmie asks whether she minds being seen with him, and is surprised by how little she cares. A director staging this moment has to think about proxemics carefully — how close the two stand, and how that closeness shifts as the conversation moves from teasing to genuine tenderness.
Jimmie proposes. Jo, who is nearly eighteen, accepts. He gives her a ring bought that morning from Woolworths, and she ties it on a ribbon around her neck to keep it hidden from Helen. They agree to marry in six months, once his naval tour ends, and Jo tells him her own plan: leave school, work part-time in a bar, then find full-time work and move out.
This engagement matters for the design-and-context question you may face in the exam. The play opened only three months before real racial violence broke out on the streets of Notting Hill in the late summer of 1958. A costume or set designer working on this scene should think about how visibly public or private to make this relationship — a choice about staging that connects directly to the social climate the play was written into.
Back in the flat, Helen interrogates Jo about where she has been and learns her boyfriend’s age and former job. Then Helen announces her own engagement to Peter. Jo reacts badly, telling her mother she is too old to marry again.
Peter arrives with flowers and chocolates. Jo goes through his wallet, finds photographs of other women, and taunts him about them and about his eye patch. Every line she throws at him carries subtext — Jo is not really interested in Peter’s past girlfriends, she is testing whether she can drive him away before he takes her mother from her.
Left alone once Helen and Peter go out, Jo cries. Jimmie returns, comforts her, and gives her medicine in milk for her cold. Jo tells him about her mother’s engagement, and the two agree he will stay with her through the Christmas holiday — the point from which the play’s pregnancy later dates.
A common mistake is placing the revelation about Jo’s father in Scene One, because it feels like the kind of confession that opens a play. It does not happen there. It happens here, in Scene Two, on Helen’s wedding day itself — after a time jump marked by wedding bells, moving the action on from the Christmas holiday Jo spends with Jimmie to Helen’s wedding morning.
Getting the sequence right matters for the exam: if you are asked to interpret an extract from the wedding-day section, you need to know that Jo has just spent Christmas with Jimmie and is secretly engaged when her mother’s wedding day arrives. The play only establishes later, in Act Two, that the pregnancy dates from that Christmas — it is not revealed in Act One.
On the wedding day, Helen arrives home with boxes of wedding clothes and offers to make Jo her bridesmaid. Jo refuses. Helen notices Jo hiding something, pulls the ring out from around her neck, and Jo is forced to admit she is engaged.
Helen explodes, insulting Jo and telling her she would make a useless wife — then softens into a warning not to repeat her own mistakes.
Before she leaves for the ceremony, Helen finally answers the question of who Jo’s father was, using the blunt language of her own time rather than a term a modern audience would choose: a man with a learning disability, whom Helen remembers as having nice eyes. Jo was conceived during Helen’s first marriage, to a wealthy man who divorced her once she became pregnant.
Helen leaves for her wedding. Jo’s parting words to her are deliberately non-committal — she refuses to say plainly whether she is glad or sorry to see her mother go — and Jo is left alone in the flat as Act One ends, exactly as she began it: waiting for someone else’s life to move around her.