It’s over 60 years since Shelagh Delaney’s debut play, written at the age of 19, burst onto the stage of The Theatre Royal, Stratford. Though going by director Bijan Sheibani’s excellent touring production for the National Theatre, you would think it had been written yesterday. For the strong characters, the challenging circumstances in which they find themselves and the waspish wit they utilise to hurt and deflect is remarkably fresh. Not to mention painfully funny and brutally honest in its warts-and-all portrayal of a fraught mother and daughter relationship in post-war Salford.

Both leads are terrific. Jodie Prenger as Helen dispensing her pearls of wisdom and withering put-downs with great comic timing and heart. “Enjoy your life,” she instructs her daughter. “Don’t get trapped.” And by trapped she means a loveless marriage, a deadend job, the cycle of poverty and the weight of motherhood without financial or family support. And Gemma Dobson as Josephine – whose charcoal drawings are said to mirror her “chaotic” life in that they lack desire, rhythm and purpose – as petulant as she is vulnerable, as hopeful as she is lost. Two single mothers doing their best with the hands they’ve been dealt. Or as Josephine bluntly opines: “We don’t ask for life, we have it thrust upon us.”

Sexism in the form of Helen’s one-eyed lover Peter (Tom Varey) rears its ugly head throughout. As does racism and homophobia when Stuart Thompson in his professional debut as Josephine’s gay flatmate Geoffrey and Durone Stokes as her black boyfriend Jimmie become easy targets for closed minds and bruised egos. But it is the golden thread of hope tinged with fear, most beautifully and movingly depicted in the final scene when Josephine contemplates her fate as a young woman and a single mother in a man’s world, which stirs the soul.

Technically, the show is equally impressive. With Bijan Sheibani utilising a live jazz band in the form of a light-touch piano, bass and drums to underscore changes in mood and tempo, as well as back a number of solo love songs including the unexpected addition of A Red, Red Rose by the velvet-voiced Stokes and a heartfelt rendition of Mad About The Boy by Thompson. And designer Hildegard Bechtler manages to recreate the hustle and bustle of home and community life with the minimum of flats and props, around which the cast are in constant motion.

Jeanette Winterson, writing in the program notes, remarked that “Women all over the world are writing plays and films now” and that “Shelagh Delaney deserves a major re-write in all these his-stories of post-war drama” because “she is the start of the possible”. A start which The National Theatre’s touring production does great justice, anchored by the two wonderful performances of Jodie Prenger and Gemma Dobson whose resilient characters, like so many women of the time and today, strive not just to “feel important” but succeed.

Peter Callaghan
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