Characters: Jo, Helen, Geof, Peter and the Boy

Five People, One Cramped World

A Taste of Honey has a small cast: two women and three men, plus a jazz trio who never speak. Every character has a motivation that collides with someone else’s across the same flat, described in Delaney’s own stage directions as comfortless. Understanding what each person wants, and what stops them getting it, is the fastest way into any extract question. This lesson builds each character in turn, then shows how the five relationships between them shift from Act One to the final curtain.

Jo (Josephine): Wanting Out, Wanting Love

Jo is seventeen — she tells the Boy she is nearly eighteen — and Helen’s daughter. Her full name, Josephine, is the form used in the cast list; in the play she is generally called Jo. She draws, and she refuses when Helen suggests a proper art school, a small moment of subtext that tells an audience she has already given up expecting support from her mother. She wants two things across the whole play: to get away from Helen, and to be loved properly by somebody. She gets neither.

Jo’s arc runs: engaged to the Boy at Christmas, abandoned when his naval tour ends, pregnant and working two jobs alone, sharing a flat with Geof, refusing his marriage proposal, and finally alone again as her labour begins. A performer playing Jo needs a wide emotional range across a single scene — she can be sarcastic and hard one moment, then frightened and childlike the next, especially when she talks about her mother’s hands or rejects Geof’s baby doll.

Helen: Comic, Cruel, and Talking to the Audience

Helen is Jo’s mother. She depends on relationships with men for money and security, and she drinks heavily. She is also the play’s funniest character and its cruellest: she can mock Jo’s drawings and praise them in the same breath, and later tell her daughter she should have got rid of her before she was born. Helen is defined by direct address, breaking the fourth wall — a device the original Theatre Workshop production used often, and one a designer or director must decide how to stage in any revival.

Helen marries Peter and leaves Jo alone at the end of Act One. She returns in Act Two Scene One because Geof secretly sends for her, offers Jo money and a home, and leaves again with Peter. She returns for good in the final scene once her marriage collapses, drives Geof out by making his position impossible, lies to Jo about where he has gone, and finally walks out again — this time because she cannot cope with learning that Jo’s baby will be Black. “I’m like you,” Jo tells her in Act Two — a line that lands hardest because it arrives in the middle of a row in which Helen has been telling Jo how badly she has managed her life.

Geof (Geoffrey): The Only Functional Parent in the Play

Geof — always spelled without a second F in his speech headings — is an art student evicted by his landlady. He moves in with Jo, cleans, cooks, pays rent, makes baby clothes and a maternity dress, and offers to be the baby’s father when he proposes marriage. Jo refuses him, telling him partly that she chose him precisely because he will not try to start a romance with her. Other characters name Geof’s sexuality as an insult during the Act Two row, but the play itself never states it openly — worth remembering, since a question could ask you to justify a directorial choice about how explicit to make his physical characterisation without contradicting the text.

In 1958, when the play is set, sex between men was a criminal offence, and the Wolfenden Report’s recommendation to change that law had been published only months before the play opened but did not become law until 1967. A designer answering the compulsory design-and-context question could use this directly: dressing Geof in soft, unremarkable colours that let him blend into the background of a late-1950s industrial district of Manchester or Salford is itself a directorial comment on a character who has to stay invisible to stay safe. Geof leaves the flat quietly near the end of the play once Helen returns, and Jo never finds out he has gone — the single biggest source of dramatic irony in the ending.

Peter Smith and The Boy (Jimmie): The Men Who Leave

Peter Smith is a car salesman and a Second World War veteran who lost an eye on service; he drinks heavily, smokes cigars, and has bought a house. He proposes to Helen in Act One, marries her, then arrives drunk in Act Two Scene One, insults Jo and Geof, snatches back money Helen had left for Jo, and leaves with Helen — their marriage is over by the final scene. He wants Helen entirely on his own terms.

The Boy is his cast-list name; in dialogue everyone calls him Jimmie. He is twenty-two, a Black sailor in the Royal Navy and a former male nurse, about to leave on a six-month tour when he meets Jo. He proposes, gives her a ring bought that morning, and stays with her through the Christmas holiday — the point from which Jo’s pregnancy dates. He never appears again after Act One: no source suggests he knows Jo is pregnant, so a performer or director must resist the temptation to play his absence as a deliberate abandonment of a child he never learns about.

How the Relationships Shift

Track three relationships across the play. Jo and Helen circle each other without ever resolving anything: the play opens and closes with the two of them connected to the same flat, exactly the trap Jo spends the whole play trying to escape. Jo and Geof build the only working household in the play through practical care rather than romance, and it is destroyed the moment Helen returns. Helen and Peter’s marriage rises and collapses entirely off-stage between scenes, visible to the audience only through what Helen brings back into the flat. A strong extract answer names which relationship is under most pressure at that exact moment and explains the choice with a vocal or design detail, not a general mood word.