Miss Shelagh Delaney's second play [The Lion in Love] makes a lesser impact than her first. The difference is considerable and may be measured roughly by the greater distance she now places between herself and her material.

She seemed in A Taste of Honey to be writing of an experience which she knew, as though at first hand to be essentially true. The result was a play which, however little of a work of art, conveyed its truth fragmentarily but memorably. Her subject in The Lion in Love … is marriage—the marriage that is led into rashly and chancily by street courtship and turns into a dog and cat relationship which, strangely, neither victim, however many attempts are made is ever able or even perhaps willing to break.

The particular marriage which the play explores has the air of being glanced at rather than of being thought out...