Shelagh Delaney was nineteen years old when she wrote "A Taste of Honey," and the only thing that puzzles me is why she hasn't written the Divine Comedy and the collected works of Henry Fielding since. She was a talented nineteen.

She was also a very understanding nineteen. Her intention, she reports in a program note …, was simply to "write as people talk." But that isn't what she's done at all. As a matter of fact, her people talk most strangely. For all that they are empty-headed chatterboxes slaving out an existence in a cheap attic "with a lovely view of the gasworks" alongside a "river the color of lead," they rap out words and phrases that now and then suggest they've all been given an aborted college education….

And there must be few people in the world with such nonstop tongues, ready with a whole new, slam-bang...