IN A year of limited opportunity for theatre visits due to Covid, my highlight was A Taste of Honey at the Trafalgar Studios in London, which I managed to catch ahead of the first lockdown.

In the National Theatre staging of Shelagh Delaney’s best-known play, Hildegard Bechtler’s set brilliantly captured the sad and shabbily claustrophobic post-war Salford flat in which mother Helen (Jodie Prenger) and daughter Jo (Gemma Dobson) go into battle. It was possible almost to smell the dirty old town outside, with its noxious gasworks, slaughterhouse and canal.

The cast were uniformly excellent, delivering Delaney’s caustic dialogue with a tangible appreciation for its cadences and nuances.