The Story: Act Two
Act Two of A Taste of Honey answers the question Act One leaves hanging: what happens to Jo once she is alone and pregnant? The act has two scenes. Scene One is the longest scene in the whole play and covers many months; Scene Two is the final scene, ending the play at the point of Jo’s labour. Knowing exactly what happens — and in what order — lets you place any printed extract from this act with confidence.
Act Two Scene One opens in summer. Jo and Geof — an art student whose landlady has evicted him — come home from a fair carrying balloons. Several months have passed since the end of Act One: Jimmie has not come back, and Jo now lives alone, working two jobs, days in a shoe shop and evenings in a bar, just to pay the rent. She tells Geof she is expecting a baby in September. He worries whether she can cope, raises the idea of ending the pregnancy, and Jo rejects it outright.
Geof offers to stay with Jo rather than just help financially: he cleans, cooks proper meals and eventually pays the rent, sleeping on the couch. Jo agrees partly because she knows he will not try to start a romance with her — a piece of subtext about his sexuality that the play never states outright.
Weeks later, the flat is hot and cramped. Geof is making baby clothes; the baby kicks, and Jo says babies disgust her, telling Geof that motherhood would suit him better than her — a joke with a serious edge, since he is the one doing the caring. When Geof kisses her, apologises, then proposes marriage and offers to raise the baby as his own, Jo refuses him. He says he would rather die than be separated from her, and by the end of the exchange the two agree they do not need to split up, even though she has said no to marriage.
Geof secretly sends for Helen without telling Jo, and asks Helen not to reveal that he did — a request that builds tension before Helen even enters. When Jo wakes and works out what Geof has done, she is furious, and the row that follows is one of the richest moments in the play for a director to stage. Helen mocks Geof’s caretaking role, insinuates the living arrangement is improper, repeats neighbourhood gossip about Jo, and tells them that “bearing a child doesn’t place one under an obligation to it”. A performer playing Helen might deliver these lines fast and light, almost comic, so the cruelty lands only after the laugh — matching the play’s mixture of wit and bleakness. A designer might use tight proxemics, crowding Helen, Geof and Jo into the small flat area of the set so the argument feels inescapable, just before Peter arrives drunk, mocks everyone, takes back the money Helen left for Jo, and leaves with her.
Act Two Scene One is the longest scene in the play and covers several months. The stage directions mark these internal time jumps with dance sequences rather than a blackout or a scene change — a stylised, music-hall-influenced device sitting alongside the play’s otherwise naturalistic dialogue.
Act Two Scene Two is the play’s final scene. It is now Jo’s ninth month. Geof cleans and mops the flat; Jo reads an out-of-date pregnancy book he found second-hand, and wears a maternity dress he has made her. The domestic care Geof provides throughout this scene is the play’s clearest picture of a functional home — built not by Jo’s biological mother, but by a friend the play never quite lets be called family.
Jo tells Geof that as a child she used to try to hold her mother’s hands and Helen always pulled them away — that Helen “had so much love for everyone else, but none for me”. Geof warns her that if she does not watch it, she will turn out exactly like Helen; Jo insists she is not like her mother at all. When Geof gives her a baby doll to practise with, Jo reacts violently against it, saying she does not want the baby, does not want to be a mother, and does not want to be a woman — a moment built around a physical motif: the play returns repeatedly to objects that stand in for things Jo cannot control.
Helen returns unannounced, with her luggage: her marriage to Peter is over, another woman is involved, and she has nowhere else to go. She and Geof clash immediately over the baby arrangements. Geof asks her not to frighten Jo by talking about how difficult the birth might be, then agrees to leave — the play’s majority reading is that Helen makes his position in the flat impossible, and he chooses to go quietly rather than cause Jo distress.
Helen does not tell Jo that Geof has left for good — she lets Jo believe he is simply not back yet. The audience knows he has gone; Jo goes on waiting for him. That concealment is the source of the ending’s dramatic irony.
Jo’s labour has begun, or is close to beginning, when she tells Helen the baby will be Black. Helen’s horror — “Oh my God! Nothing else can happen to me now.” — pushes directly against Jo’s earlier claim, in Act One Scene Two, that whatever else her mother might be, she “isn’t prejudiced against colour”; the play sets that claim up only to demolish it. Helen decides to go for a drink, breaking the fourth wall to speak to the audience before she exits, a technique she has used earlier in the play. A performer playing Jo, left alone, might let her voice soften and slow across the final lines, physically relaxing against the doorpost rather than standing rigid, to suggest exhausted acceptance rather than despair. A designer might choose a single warm-toned lighting special isolating Jo downstage as the rest of the flat dims, letting the audience feel her aloneness without losing the moment’s fragile warmth — a choice that also has to reckon with 1958’s attitudes to race and unmarried motherhood, since both are what Jo now faces completely alone.
At the final curtain, Jo is alone on stage. Helen has just left to get a drink; Geof has already gone for good and Jo does not know it. Jo leans against the doorpost, looks round the room, smiles a little to herself, remembers Geof, and recites the Pippin Hill nursery rhyme he taught her — she does not sing or hum it. The baby is not born before the curtain falls.
It is easy to confuse this ending with the 1961 film, which is not the set text. The film adds a sparkler, a bonfire-night setting, and a moment of Geoffrey watching from the shadows — none of which appear in the play. For the exam, only the stage version’s ending counts: no reconciliation, no returning fiancé, no birth, and no Geof or Helen on stage at the very last moment.
Because the paper includes a compulsory short answer question linking design and context and/or theatrical conventions, keep this act’s context in view. Helen’s reaction to the baby’s race sits three months before the real Notting Hill riots of 1958, and Geof’s unspoken sexuality sits in a Britain where sex between men was still a criminal offence. Any staging decision for this act — a lighting state, a costume, a pause before a line — can be justified by naming that context, not just by naming an emotion.