Theatrical rarities revealed

There’s got to be a first time for everything, no matter how often you go to the theatre. It slightly surprised me, though, to realise that I was seeing Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey for the first time when the National revived it earlier this week.

It’s a play that seems embedded in theatrical consciousness as a genuine groundbreaker, yet it is very rarely done – at least in London. (There have been major regional revivals in Oldham in 2006, Manchester in 2008 and Sheffield in 2012.) Of course, all roads do not lead to London – especially for a play that is set in Salford.

But it is fascinating to note that although we’ve not had a West End run since the original transferred from Stratford East to Wyndham’s back in 1959, it has had two Broadway productions, first in 1960 when Angela Lansbury – now in London about to play Madame Arcati in Blithe Spirit – starred as the mother in its New York premiere, and again in 1981, when Roundabout Theatre Company revived it (with Amanda Plummer as the daughter).

And just next week, the Finborough is offering an extremely rare revival of Terence Rattigan’s Variations on a Theme – the play that reputedly inspired Delaney to write A Taste of Honey in the first place, after she saw it and felt she could do better. That play has not been seen in London for over 50 years – so we’ll find out next week, in a neat programming coincidence, whether she did do better.

By the same token, you won’t have seen the 1947 Broadway musical Finian’s Rainbow in London until the Union Theatre revived it last week, unless you were around back in that same year when it came all too briefly to the Palace Theatre. (There was, however, a staged reading as part of Ian Marshall Fisher’s Lost Musicals season at the Fortune Theatre back in 1999). In this case, though, I’d seen the 2009 Broadway revival, but in fact much preferred the Union’s far more modest production that revealed its whimsical charms without overblown sets or performances.

Just yesterday I was expressing some of the joys of the fringe in offering us different views of the world, and I noted then that I also preferred the current UK premiere of Superior Donuts at Southwark Playhouse over the play’s Broadway production I also saw in 2009. So sometimes the fringe gives us not only rare outings for shows we don’t know, but better outings, too.

Looking through the National’s One Hundred Plays of the Century list, published in 2000 to mark the previous century’s theatre, I am struck by how few rarities remain on the list. Many of the titles come around again and again – not surprisingly, I suppose, for a publicly voted for list of great plays. One, of course, has never closed – The Mousetrap – and we’ve currently got The Weir back in the West End, Oh What a Lovely War at Stratford East, and Clare Higgins and Tim Pigott-Smith were announced earlier this week to be doing Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? this summer in Bath.  Meanwhile, on Broadway they’ve currently got Waiting for God and about to have A Raisin in the Sun again.

But at the same time, finally seeing A Taste of Honey (which is also on the list) made me think of what other plays I’ve not seen on it – so here goes:

1909 Strife by John Galsworthy
1926 The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd by DH Lawrence
1934 Love on the Dole by Ronald Gow
1961 The Knack by Ann Jellicoe
1968 The Ruling Class by Peter Barnes
1973 The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil by John McGrath
1976 AC/DC by Heathcote Williams

There’s always something more to see!