A Taste of Honey

Jo (Rita Tushingham, in her Cannes-awarded debut) is seventeen, struggling at school, and saddled with a mother more interested in her latest man than in raising her daughter. Before long, she will also have a new boyfriend – a Black sailor – and a flatmate who is openly gay. All this in the conservative England of the late 1950s. One of Tony Richardson’s finest films and a landmark of kitchen sink realism, A Taste of Honey turns its camera towards a whole range of subjects usually ignored: single motherhood, alcoholism, teenage pregnancy, interracial relationships and homosexuality. Yet it never reduces them to issues meant simply to shock or move. Instead, it offers a nuanced, empathetic portrait of lived reality.

More than anything, this adaptation of Shelagh Delaney’s play is a story about the loneliness of growing up, the pain of generational inheritance, and the curse of discovering in yourself the very traits you recognise in your parents. For all the passing years, social change and the gentrification of Salford, the emotional truth captured in A Taste of Honey remains as immediate and affecting as ever.

Marcin Prymas

Tony Richardson (1928–1991) – British director, screenwriter, and producer associated with the British cinema of the “angry young men”. His films often addressed class divisions and social change, combining realism with formal freedom. Open to genre experimentation and new narrative forms, he remained one of the most distinctive voices of postwar British cinema.