Shelagh Delaney gave working-class women a taste of what was possible

Delaney has written other books, but always remembered for A Taste of Honey, what he called the theater of the time without realizing

Shelagh Delaney, who died Sunday, was almost as important for what it symbolizes what she wrote. She was, as Jeanette Winterson wrote in The Guardian last year, "the playwright's first working class woman." And though nothing he wrote later managed the success of his first book, A Taste of Honey, Delaney showed that Salford 18 years could break the walls of which, even in 1958, was still a very middle class, male-dominated British theater.

The story of how A Taste of Honey was written is well known. Delaney was taken to see Terence Rattigan Variations on a theme to Manchester Opera House and became convinced he could do better. Thus, in just over two weeks, she knocked on a play about a young girl struggling Salford, Jo, who was left alone by his mother frivolous Christmas, going to bed with a sailor transitional Nigerian, become pregnant and is served by an art student love effeminate. After writing the book, we had the Delaney be addressed to Joan Littlewood, who became the Theatre Royal, Stratford East in a house bustling new drama.

• In his autobiography, Littlewood did not hide the fact that much work needed to bring down the game as Delaney. He loved the sparkling dialogue, but he felt a lot of scenes were plot underdeveloped and anecdotal. It therefore Avis Bunnage, Jo's mother, to use their talent to the direct and put in a jazz quartet, composed of the trumpet, drums, guitar and saxophone, to set the mood. Delaney naive little script quickly became a critical success. "There are a lot of swearing in the game of Miss Delaney" wrote Kenneth Tynan in The Observer. "It is very important, the smell of life." He noted that Delaney would have a lot of time in the future to you worry about words like "form", that means something, and concepts such as "vulgar," who do not.

This question of the form is fascinating. After the success of A Taste of Honey, Joan Littlewood tried to offer advice specifically young playwright. "Playing a good game," Delaney wrote Littlewood, "one of Ibsen, for example, then analyze, take note of the construction. Dramaturgy is an art, not only the inspiration." To our knowledge, the advice was ignored: the second series of Delaney, The Lion in Love, had little impact and quickly sold out theater career

Delaney, however, write a series of short stories, scripts for various radio stations and a handful of scripts good enough for the white bus Lindsay Anderson and Charlie Bubbles, directed by and starring Albert Finney. I have not seen it, because for the first time in 1967, but I have a memory of an extraordinary film in which Finney plays a successful writer who made a pilgrimage to their northern roots. Finney, like Delaney, described Salford, the film had a strong personal favor. But as skillfully Delaney emphasized the idea of ??a writer isolated from reality by the fame and success. There is a particularly good scene in a luxury hotel where the boy asks Finney: "Are you still working, sir, or you just act now"

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