Brawling, boozing, teenage pregnancy and fractured families: Shelagh Delaney’s benchmark drama, first staged by Joan Littlewood in London in 1958, has lost none of its relevance 50 years on. To mark the play’s anniversary, the Royal Exchange in Manchester offers a revival by Jo Combes that points up the work’s enduring topicality, somewhat at the expense of a sense of period. Nor does Combes find effective solutions to the difficulties presented by the uneven writing of an author who was then a gifted but inexperienced 19-year-old, though the quirkiness and passion of Delaney’s young voice still rings out.

Littlewood’s original staging featured a jazz trio; here, there’s a DJ who supplies a Mancunian soundtrack featuring the Smiths, Joy Division, Oasis and the Ting Tings. Unfortunately, the anachronistic choice of music detracts from the Fifties setting, particularly when the actors break into full-blown choreographed routines that, rather than enhance the action, impede its flow and intensity – deeply problematic, given that the play is meandering and tonally confused.

Jo (Jodie McNee) and her brassy, hard-drinking mother, Helen (Sally Lindsay, best known as the Coronation Street barmaid Shelley) move into a grotty Salford tenement between the gasworks and a slaughterhouse. Helen’s escape plan involves marriage to a greasy but relatively affluent younger man, while Jo embarks on a romance with Jimmie, (Marcel McCalla) a black sailor. When Helen abandons her daughter, Jo discovers that she is pregnant and her friend Geoffrey, (Adam Gillen) an emotionally fragile gay art student, moves in to care for her.

Times Archive, 1958: A Taste Of Honey

Nothing could be less sentimental than Miss Delaney's treatment of the play's emotional events

Jo’s connection with Helen is spiked with anguish, but Delaney frequently undercuts her dialogue with theatrically awkward, self-conscious comic asides. Combes rarely locates the middle ground between the humorous and the haranguing and, as a result, her production and its overbroad performances become wearing. Relief comes in Delaney’s haphazard moments of vividness. When Jimmie tells Jo that he adores her, she cries in a burst of youthful elation, “So do I. I can’t resist myself!” Bitter resentment lurks in Helen’s feckless remark to her daughter, “It’s your life, ruin it your own way”, and there’s irresistible poignancy in Geoff’s desperate longing to be loved, and allowed to love. This is a hit-and-miss rendering of an erratic work; yet it remains passionate and pungent.

Box office: 0161-833 9833, to Sat Dec 6, 2008

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