Genealogy

Abstract

Jo, pregnant by her former lover Jimmie, sets up home with Geoffrey, a gay art student, in Shelagh Delaney’s 1958 play, A Taste of Honey, filmed in 1961 by Tony Richardson. Geof asks Jo to marry him, she refuses, but they carry on with their own version of family life for a while. When compared with other relationships in Jo’s life — her brief affair with Jimmie, her constant bickering with her mother and her mother’s string of useless boyfriends — Geof offers Jo a sense of intimacy and constancy. Although she tells him that theirs is ‘not marrying love’, Jo also quips that she and Geof have ‘been married for a thousand years’ (Delaney, 2000: 76). They set up home together, and prepare for the baby. But, to Jo’s mother, Helen, ‘It’s a funny-looking set-up’ (Delaney, 2000: 61).