Saturday, September 18, 2010

My hero / Shelagh Delaney by Jeanette Winterson

 



My hero: 

Shelagh Delaney

by Jeanette Winterson


Jeanette Winterson
18 September 2010

S

helagh Delaney's first play, A Taste of Honey, was produced at the Theatre Royal Stratford East in 1958, and then transferred to the West End and Broadway. She was 18. It's the story of Jo, a working-class girl who gets pregnant while her mother holidays with her fancy man. Delaney's play sits in between John Osborne's Look Back in Anger (1956) and Joe Orton's Entertaining Mr Sloane (1964). All three plays were made into movies. Each was part of the new wave in theatre and cinema where the (male) northern working classes stripped life down to the raw.





But Delaney was a woman. She was the dog on its hind legs, to paraphrase Dr Johnson's comment about women preachers – "like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all." A Taste of Honey was not a flash in the pan, as critics enjoyed calling it. Sure, she got her first chance, but then what? Any young writer needs time and self-belief, and crucially, the belief of others, too. Orton, Osborne, Harold Pinter were not sentimentalised and patronised – or written off – in the way that Delaney was. The reviews of Honey and her second play, A Lion in Love, read like a depressing essay in sexism. Pinter was a great writer, no doubt about it, but his early work was messy. It was Peter Hall who turned things round for him with The Homecoming in 1964. Nobody turned things round for Delaney.

Shelag Delaney

She wrote two plays, got herself a Bafta for her film script of A Taste of Honey, and quietly petered out, though most people forget that she also wrote the film script for Dance with a Stranger (1985), a powerful movie about Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in England.

Delaney was born in Salford in 1939. I was born in Manchester in 1959. Same background, same early success. She was like a lighthouse – pointing the way and warning about the rocks underneath. She was the first working-class woman playwright. She had all the talent and we let her go.

THE GUARDIAN




2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler 
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser
007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville
011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm

2010

017 My hero / Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín
018 My hero / Francisco Goya by Diana Athill
019 My hero / Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
020 My hero / Arthur Holmes by Richard Fortey

036 My hero / Robert Lowell by Jonathan Raban
037 My hero / Beryl Bainbridge by Michael Holroyd
038 My hero / Charles Schulz by Jenny Colgan
039 My hero / Oliver Knussen by Adam Foulds
040 My hero / Annie Proulx by Alan Warner

041 My hero / David Lynch by Paul Murray
042 My hero / Edwin Morgan by Robert Crawford
043 My hero / Anne Lister by Emma Donoghue
044 My hero / Jane Helen Harrinson by Mary Beard
045 My hero / Edmund Burke by David Marquand
046 My hero / Shelagh Deleaney by Jeanette Winterson
047 My hero / Christopher Marlowe by Val McDermid
048 My hero / Gwen John by Anne Enright
049 My hero / Michael Mayne by Susan Hill
050 My hero / Stanley Spencer by Howard Jacobson

051 My hero / William Beveridge by Will Hutton
052 My hero / Jean McConville by Amanda Foreman
053 My hero / Alexander Pushkin by Elaine Feinstein
058 My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal

2011
079 My hero / Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
087 My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside
096 My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller
097 Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan
100 Thomas Tranströmer by Robin Robertson
102 My hero / David Hockney by Susan Hill

2012

190 My hero / Iris Murdoch by Charlotte Mendelson
194 My hero / René Descartes by James Kelman
199 My hero / Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer

2015
2016



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