Shelagh Delaney, who died on Sunday, was almost as important for what she symbolised as for what she wrote. She was, as Jeanette Winterson wrote in the Guardian last year, "the first working-class woman playwright". And even if nothing she later wrote achieved the success of her first play, A Taste of Honey, Delaney proved that an 18-year-old Salford girl could breach the walls of what, even in 1958, was still a mainly middle-class, male-dominated British theatre.
The story of how A Taste of Honey came to be written is well-known. Delaney had been taken to see Terence Rattigan's Variations on a Theme at Manchester's Opera House and came away convinced she could do better. So, in little more than a fortnight, she banged out a play about a feisty Salford girl, Jo, who is left alone by her flighty mum one Christmas, goes to bed with a transient Nigerian sailor, gets pregnant and is lovingly tended by an effeminate art student. Having written the piece, Delaney had the nous to send it to Joan Littlewood, who had turned the Theatre Royal, Stratford East into a vibrant home of new drama.
In her autobiography, Littlewood made no bones about the fact that a lot of work was needed to knock Delaney's play into shape. She liked the sparky dialogue but felt many of the scenes were undeveloped and the plot anecdotal. So she got Avis Bunnage, as Jo's mum, to use her talent for direct address and brought in a jazz quartet, consisting of trumpet, drums, guitar and sax, to set the mood. Delaney's slightly artless script quickly became a critical success. "There are plenty of crudities in Miss Delaney's play," wrote Kenneth Tynan in the Observer. "There is also more importantly the smell of living." He also pointed that Delaney would have plenty of time in the future to worry about words such as "form", which mean something, and concepts like "vulgarity", which don't.
That question of form is fascinating. After the success of A Taste of Honey, Joan Littlewood tried to offer her young playwright concrete guidance. "Read a good play," Littlewood wrote to Delaney, "an Ibsen for example, then analyse it, note the construction. Playwriting is a craft, not just inspiration." As far as we know, the advice went unheeded: Delaney's second play, The Lion in Love, made little impact and her theatrical career quickly petered out.
Delaney did, however, write a number of short stories, several radio scripts and a handful of rather good screenplays including The White Bus for Lindsay Anderson and Charlie Bubbles, directed by and starring Albert Finney. I've not seen the latter since it first came out in 1967 but I have a memory of an extraordinary film in which Finney plays a successful writer who makes a pilgrimage back to his northern roots. Since Finney, like Delaney, hailed from Salford, the film had a strong personal favour. But Delaney also wittily pinned down the idea of a writer insulated from reality by fame and success. There is one particularly good scene in a plush hotel where the waiter asks Finney: "Are you still working, sir, or do you just do the writing now?"
Objectively viewed, you could say Delaney's career never fulfilled its initial promise. But what she did do was open a door for succeeding generations; and if we now think there is nothing freakish or unusual about women dramatists making a mark in their teens or coming from a working-class background, we have Shelagh Delaney to thank for it.