Staging and Design: The Flat, the Street and the Band
One Set, Two Worlds, Ten Months
Delaney’s stage direction for A Taste of Honey describes a single set: a comfortless flat in Manchester and the street outside. This is a composite set — one design holding two different worlds, and it never changes across all four scenes. As a designer, your first job is deciding how those two areas sit next to each other and how actors move between them.
The Flat and the Street: A Composite Set
Delaney gives very little further description of the flat or the street beyond this: no detailed floor plan, no list of furniture, no lighting cues. Sources agree this was likely deliberate, leaving directors and designers free to choose whether to stage the play naturalistically — a genuinely shabby kitchen, real damp on the walls — or stylised — suggesting the flat through a few significant objects and letting lighting and sound do the rest of the work.
The text names the setting as Manchester, though the play’s world, its 1961 film and Delaney’s own life all point towards Salford — productions and commentators differ, so a safe answer acknowledges both. The story runs across roughly nine to ten months, the length of Jo’s pregnancy, staged in two acts of two scenes each. A single set has to hold Christmas, a wedding day, a hot summer and a final autumn without a single change of walls.
The flat and the street outside are staged as one composite set that never changes, even though the story spans about nine to ten months and moves between winter, summer and autumn. Time and mood have to be created through lighting, sound and performance, not through new scenery.
Props as Symbols: Bulbs, Ring, Doll, Drink and Hands
A handful of objects do symbolic work across the whole play, functioning as props as symbols rather than mere set dressing. Jo unpacks a set of flower bulbs in the very first scene, planning a window box; drink appears constantly, from Helen’s whisky to her final decision to go and get one; and hands recur too, in Jo’s memory of her mother pulling her hands away and in her later compliment to Geof about his.
The engagement ring Jimmie gives Jo is tied on a ribbon round her neck so Helen will not see it — a prop deliberately hidden from view until Helen finds it on the wedding day. Later, Geof gives Jo a baby doll to practise on, and her violent rejection of it becomes one of the play’s rawest physical moments. A designer choosing exactly how these objects look, and exactly when they are visible to the audience, is making a design decision with real dramatic weight.
Consider staging the bulbs across the whole play. In Act One, Scene One, Jo could unpack them into a small wooden crate and set it down somewhere visible — a window ledge, if the design allows one — so the audience registers it as an object she cares about. The play later returns to this detail: the bulbs are found again, still unplanted. A designer might keep that same crate in view, gradually pushed further out of the way by other furniture and clutter across the production, so that by the final scene it has almost disappeared into the mess of the room. A single, tight lighting special picking it out for a few seconds in the last scene — without any character commenting on it — lets the audience complete the thought themselves: nothing in this flat has managed to grow.
Sound and Music: The Band on the Set
The original 1958 production staged the Apex Jazz Trio — cornet, guitar and double bass — live, on stage, playing throughout. Songs are sung by the characters, and dance sequences in Act Two, Scene One mark the passing of weeks and months; accounts of the scene's very last moment differ, with some describing Jo and Geof dancing together as the lights fade and others simply a quiet, tender exchange. This turns scene transitions into performance moments in their own right, rather than blackouts where nothing happens.
This raises one of the biggest design questions for the whole play: how naturalistic should a production be? The dialogue and the domestic situations are written with real social detail — poverty, an unheated flat, two jobs to cover the rent. But live music, songs and dance sequences are not naturalistic devices at all; some of this theatrical apparatus is thought to have come from Joan Littlewood’s rehearsal room rather than from Delaney’s original manuscript. A strong design answer does not pretend this tension does not exist — it explains how a production chooses to handle it.
The Apex Jazz Trio (cornet, guitar, double bass) played live on stage in the original 1958 production, and dance sequences mark the passing of time in Act Two, Scene One. Sources genuinely disagree about how naturalistic the play should look overall.
Direct Address and Staging Configuration
Helen repeatedly turns to speak straight to the audience, a technique called direct address. It breaks the fourth wall that a fully naturalistic production would otherwise keep intact, and it lets Helen recruit the audience as a kind of confidante against her own daughter. Staging this well depends on sightlines: every part of the audience needs a clear view of Helen’s face at that moment, or the technique loses its force.
Staging configuration changes what direct address, and the band, can do. In an end-on or proscenium arch layout, Helen can plant herself downstage and address the whole audience as a single mass. On a thrust stage or a traverse, she has to choose whether to turn to different sections in turn, which can make the audience feel more directly implicated, almost gossiped to individually. Proxemics matter too: closing the distance between Jo and Geof in the domestic scenes can make their improvised, low-key family feel warmer than anything Helen and Peter manage.
Three revivals answered the naturalism question in three different ways. The National Theatre’s 2014 production, directed by Bijan Sheibani with design by Hildegard Bechtler, cut the on-stage band almost entirely and used very little direct address, instead building a massive rotating set of sooty tenements and scrubbed doorsteps; one review judged this poverty as caricature rather than lived-in hardship, though other coverage of the same production stressed jazz played between scenes. Trafalgar Studios’ 2019 touring production restored a three-piece jazz band live on stage, underscored the action with a bluesy, low-rumbling score, and used in-costume stagehands to physically move and reassemble the flat’s rooms, damaged and cramped, in full view of the audience. The Royal Exchange’s 2024 production, directed by Emma Baggott, went further still, adding a dedicated Jazz Singer role alongside a movement director and a voice and dialect coach. None of these choices is more correct than another — each is a legitimate answer to the same design question, and your own answers should show the same kind of reasoning.
Whatever configuration or style you choose, every strong design answer for A Taste of Honey does the same three things: it names a specific moment, it names a specific design element — an instrument, a fabric, a lighting state, a cross-fade — and it states the effect that choice has on the audience watching it.