ON encountering A Taste Of Honey for the first time, Graham Greene observed that Shelagh Delaney's debut play had "all the freshness of Mr Osborne's Look Back In Anger and a greater maturity".

Written in 1958, this kitchen-sink drama was the work of a 19-year-old salesgirl, cinema usherette and photographer's lab assistant from Salford, who had left school at 16.

The play, a proto-feminist tale of working-class life in Manchester, had come into the hands of Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop Company, in the form of a two-hander involving a battle of wills between teenage daughter Jo and her irresponsible, heavy-drinking mother, Helen. As was her wont, Littlewood added a musical flourish, while Delaney expanded her story to add three male characters to the cast.

Theatre Royal artistic director Damian Cruden has taken up that musical motif, to enhance the contrasting darkness and light of Delaney's slowly suffocating domestic drama of teenage pregnancy, inter-racial relations and homosexuality. He sees A Taste Of Honey as a play that "engages with the outsiders of the world, their search for love and understanding, when at times it all seems futile", much like blues and jazz music.

Putting the two together, Cruden has the dilapidated street walls, and lighting cables on Dawn Allsopp's expansive, open-plan stage light up like theatre footlights and movie-house billboards whenever a character breaks into song, in the manner of Dennis Potter's Pennies From Heaven and The Singing Detective, in brief bursts of fulfilment. Later, a manhole cover will dance in time to the music.

You will tune into all this jazz from the choreographed start when the cast dances its way through a scene-setting opening that has Helen (Katherine Dow Blyton) and Jo (Theatre Royal newcomer Helen Rutter) moving home once more to run-down lodgings overlooking Canal Street. The water stinks, the nearby slaughterhouse stinks, clothes turn dirty on the washing line, and all this seeps into the embittered relationship of Jo and Helen.

In her wig and Lancashire accent, Dow Blyton initially brings to mind Hayley in Coronation Street (an unfortunately distracting thought) but soon her sparring with Rutter's Jo consumes you. Dow Blyton's Helen is hard of face but soft of contour for her fancy men; Rutter has that Jane Horrocks gift of conveying tenderness and toughness all at once. Their mutual vulnerability is tangible.

There is more than something of the night about Mark White's dapper-suited dodgy piece of work, Peter, Helen's latest beau. Cornelius Macarthy sets hearts swooning as the crooning, handsome black sailor Jim, and delicacy of detail denotes Glyn Williams's performance as nascent gay Geoffrey.

A Taste Of Honey may be slow-burning for modern tastes but it still makes soap opera look powder-puff.

Updated: 10:03 Thursday, March 18, 2004