The world's oldest human love story

The heart of the play is the relationship between Jo and her mother Helen. They do not resemble an ideal of mothers and daughters. The play begins with them bickering. They are set at odds in the first two lines. "Well this is the place", Helen says, "and I don't like it", replies Jo. Things do not improve from there. Over the course of the play, we see how Helen's shortcomings as a mother have shaped Jo's life. Helen, it is clear, blames Jo for what has gone wrong in her own life. She says she has always tried to forget her birth, and points out that Jo being born was the reason her husband left her. The role of a mother has acquired a special urgency for Jo because when Helen leaves, she becomes pregnant. The play asks if it might be possible to escape a cycle of bitterness and blame. The answer is not a positive one. "I mean it. I hate motherhood", says Jo, and we can see why. At the time the play was first staged, there was a great deal of stigma against unwed mothers, but A Taste of Honey treats the difficulties they faced without judgement.

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At some point, every character in A Taste of Honey abandons Jo. Her mother leaves her alone to be with Peter. Her boyfriend leaves her to return to sea, abandoning their baby in the process. Even Geof leaves her when Helen returns and he decides that "she can't cope with the two of us", before Helen leaves again. The play shows us how hard it is to be there for another person, and how much fear of abandonment can affect someone's life. Helen is partly the way she is because she was also abandoned by her husband, leaving her in a precariousUnpredictable; uncertain. situation. It becomes impossible to feel secure when it seems that someone could leave at any moment. At the same time, that dependence on people who could leave can feel like a trap, which is why Helen tells Jo not to get trapped in a marriage. Abandonment causes more abandonment, as people leave to escape situations made insecure by leaving.

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Another critical way that Jo is trapped is by her class. "Kitchen sink dramas" were given their moniker for showing the reality of working class life in Britain at the time. The name comes from seeing interior spaces that you would be unlikely to see in the homes of wealthier people, who did not have to work or socialise in their own kitchens because they had space and servants. The first thing we are told about Helen and Jo's new house is that Helen can afford the rent, which she points out is "far more important than your feelings". The family's lack of money is what drives the drama in general, as it drives the female characters' dependence on unreliable men. This is made most obvious when Peter comes and withdraws Helen's offer of support to Jo. His control over Helen is something he takes pride in here, as he says ,"I dragged you out of the gutter". Their position "in the gutter" puts the play's female characters in the precarious hands of others.

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Helen's final abandonment of Jo comes when she learns that the father of Jo's baby was Black. The stigma against an unwed mother was bad enough, but the play points out that interracial relationships faced a further barrier. Helen balks: "Can you see me wheeling a pram with a . . . Oh my God, I'll have to have a drink." Her racism is echoed by other characters, even Jo, who at times is horrified by the idea of having a Black child. It becomes another source of shame to her. Britain in the 1950s was experiencing a wave of migration from the Caribbean, and Black people in the country faced a racist backlash against their presence. The play parallels this with the treatment of Jo, whose position as a social outsider is doubled as a consequence of this racism. The play offers a vision of the whole of society from the vantage point of a small room. The relationships within this space are enough to show that society is locked into rigid categories, including race and gender, which make it impossible for Jo to flourish.

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Because of the poverty that Jo and Helen live in, love is more of a means to an end than anything to value for its own sake. Helen blames herself for having sex with a "village idiot" because she was unsatisfied by her husband, and it is clear that sex is for her a source of shame, or at best a way of securing her position. "For one night, actually it was the afternoon, I loved him", she says of Jo's father, and we see that this kind of love has become worthless to her now, a reminder of weakness.  Instead, she has a string of relationships with men that she depends on but does not really love. Sex and love often seem to be incompatible in the play, or combine disastrously to make a woman vulnerable, as when Jo's boyfriend leaves her. Because Geof, the art student that Jo moves in with after she becomes pregnant, is gay, she doesn't feel that she can be with him properly. However, the absence of a sexual feeling prevents their relationship from descending into the kinds of cruelty that seem to characterise Helen's relationships. Jo tells Geof, "I know you'll never ask anything from me". Almost every relationship in the play is transactional, and whatever hope the play offers comes from the idea that in a fairer world, it might not have to be.

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