In Manchester we’ve recently seen Jodie Prenger breathe new life into Mike Leigh’s Abigail’s Party as over-bearing hostess Beverly. Now she leads the National Theatre’s new production of A Taste of Honey, which opens at the Lowry in Salford, the city where Shelagh Delaney penned and set her working-class drama more than 60 years ago.

There is no doubt Prenger is a huge box-office draw, and rightly so. She brings likeability to well-trodden and troubled characters; she has great comic timing and is never less than mesmerising on stage. Here, she embraces the brashness, humour and often ignorance of single-mum, Helen, while injecting a genuine vulnerability to her performance, giving the character genuine humanity the audience can relate to.
In her hands the dialogue feels fresh, fast and edgily cutting. It makes us look again at Delaney’s script and realise what an achievement it was for any woman at that time, let alone a working-class woman with little education.

Delaney left school at the age of 15 and wrote this play in two weeks aged 18 after her first visit to the theatre. There is a rawness to the writing that hasn’t lessened with time. Salford may have changed, but the gritty humour of survival is still recognisable.
The story centres on a mother, Helen and daughter, Jo, who drift from one grotty flat to the next, as Helen’s fancy takes her. The pair have a shouty relationship. At one point, art student, Geoffrey asks: ‘Why are you always shouting?’ to which Jo replies: ‘Because we like it.’

As struggling teenager, Jo, Gemma Dobson is annoyingly shouty at times – appropriately just like an angry teen. When her mum runs off with Peter (Tom Varey), a cocky drunk, half her age, Jo finds herself in the arms of handsome Black sailor, Jimmie who promises love and marriage. Six months later she is living unconventionally with Geoffrey, a confused young gay man who also offers to marry her.

In one sense Jo is bursting through conventions and ignorance of a previous generation and marking out a new future. In another she is reliving her mother’s mistakes.

Hildegard Bechtler’s industrial grey set captures this dramatic starkness while director, Bijan Sheibani adds an extra dimension to the story with a filmic soundtrack from live musicians playing piano, drums and double-bass on stage. Prenger, well-known for her musical stage roles in Calamity Jane and Oliver, opens with a sultry song by the piano; Durone Stokes adds joy with his romantic love-song as Romeo sailor, Jimmie; and Stuart Thompson, making an impressive professional stage debut as Geoffrey, lightens the mood when he dances on stage for the first time to ‘Mad about the Boy’. It’s entertaining, bold and, like the best soap opera, leaves us wanting to know what happens next.

The National Theatre on tour: A Taste of Honey is at The Lowry, Salford Quays from 13-21 September 2019 and tours the UK until 16 November 2019. Age guidance 13+ This performance includes smoking using non-nicotine E-cigarettes and E-Cigars.

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Leigh has tweaked the script for this new production, and director, Sarah Esdaile has injected some of his original authenticity by allowing the actors to imagine their characters as fully-human in off-stage scenarios.

This has paid off with a richly layered production that keeps comedy and tragedy never more than a hair’s breadth away. As fast as the laughs keep coming so do the genuine body-blow barbs – and that’s just between husband and wife.

Janet Bird’s wonderful design literally removes the veneer of respectability when it lifts and unfolds to reveal Beverly preparing to welcome guests into her fabulous, on-trend, new home. On the surface she has it all: the real – not just leather look – leather three-piece, the fully-stocked drinks cabinet, and high-tech fibre-optic lamp. But even before the night descends into chaos we spot little chinks in Beverly’s well-presented armour when she puts a gift of Beaujolais in the fridge.

As over-bearing hostess Beverly, Jodie Prenger, sashays around the room in her paisley-print maxi-dress, demanding her guests dance to Demis Roussos, force-feeding them cheese and pineapple sticks, and making quiet divorcee, Susan sick with ‘just another top-up’ of gin.

Yet, despite the monstrous absurdity of her character, Prenger lifts her above caricature, to give a mesmerizing performance that captures Beverly’s sadness and vulnerability as well as her affected one-upmanship. She looks like a woman who enjoys life but has had hers stifled in this suburban box.

Vicky Binns, dressed in a cute baby-pink mini-dress, plays wide-eyed neighbour, Angela with just the right balance of innocence and knowing. Rose Keegan looks a little shell-shocked as Susan who has come to the party because she’s been thrown out of her own home for daughter, Abigail to host her own. She doesn’t have much to say but makes each line memorable with a tortured tone.

If you think the women come out of it badly, Leigh gives masculinity an even rougher ride in Beverly’s workaholic bore of a husband, Laurence (Daniel Casey) and the handsome but violent Tony (Calum Callaghan).

It is an absorbing production where the well-observed physicality of the characters brings as much humour as the sharp lines they deliver.

While the layers are peeled from these middle-aged lives to reveal the chaos and sadness beneath, the raw sound of a new generation beats through the wall. Forty-years on, décor, tastes, use of language, and certainly house-prices have changed. But strip these away and we’re left wondering if a grown-up Abigail living in the suburbs would be so much different from her mum?

Abigail’s Party is at The Opera House, Manchester from 8-13 April 2019.

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‘She must be playing it younger,’ a friend says to me before the show. Well, a little, but not much. Willie Russell’s Liverpudlian housewife facing a mid-life crisis is 42-years-old. In 1989, when I saw the film, Pauline Collins’ character seemed much older.

Perhaps that’s one thing we recognise in this 30-year anniversary production – being 42-years-old is not always what you imagine it would be.  And also, 80s fashion, particularly a royal blue two-piece, with a wide brimmed white hat, isn’t as flattering as people once thought.

The setting of the play is very much a period piece. We meet Shirley in her pine kitchen, with yellow painted walls, a round-dialled telephone on the wall and a deep fat fryer on the go, cooking the famous egg and chips for her husband’s tea.

Yet as Prenger begins her monologue, the dialogue is fresh, snappy and very funny. Of course, the story is of its time in so far as it’s not uncommon for women to travel alone, and I’m not sure how many men expect their tea waiting for them on the table when they get home from work. Given the same scenario in 2017 perhaps it’s more likely Shirley would have been seduced by smooth words over the internet than in a Greek taverna, but the cultural references are still recognisable and the emotions never change.

The Lowry’s Lyric Theatre is a huge stage for a one-woman show, but Prenger pulls it off wonderfully. She is an incredibly likable performer and her natural warmth is perfect for the role. Whether she’s talking to the wall or a seaside rock, her animated conversation and superb comic timing fill the stage with an energy that is both absorbing and uplifting.

As Shirley Valentine would say, ‘It’s brill’.

Shirley Valentine is at The Lowry from 19-24 June 2017.

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