The production of a new play by a nineteen year old young woman in Salford is now the stuff of theatrical legend. Shelagh Delaney wrote A Taste of Honey in 1959 and sent it directly to Joan Littlewood at Theatre Workshop; it was the play that would make Delaney’s name. The play was not in itself formally experimental, this was her first play, and she was not experienced in theatrical conventions, like Look Back in Anger, its form is a conventional two act drama, it is the characters and setting that made it innovative. Drawing on the archives of the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, this chapter argues that it was the production by Littlewood and Theatre Workshop that took Delaney’s play beyond the conventions of social realism. The blurred timelines, the movement of locations, the use of folk song and live music , these were innovations that Littlewood and the Theatre Workshop team brought to the production and which took the script of A Taste of Honey into the realms of the experimental, an experimentalism that was augmented by the direction and performances. Joan Littlewood was undoubtedly a charismatic and inspiring theatre director and Shelagh Delaney was undeniably a phenomenon as a new young voice, but it was in the alchemy of the collective practices of Theatre Workshop that their experimentalism could flourish.