A rediscovered play by Shelagh Delaney has become an audio drama featuring Toby Jones and Rita Tushingham, The Guardian reported. Catch Me Who Can was found by the playwright’s daughter after Delaney’s death.
The work concerns a teenage truant and offers another way into the writing of an author widely associated with A Taste of Honey. Its emergence expands the range of material through which audiences can encounter Delaney’s work.
A recovered script occupies a different position from a newly commissioned play. The writing already exists, but bringing it before an audience requires decisions about performance and medium. In this case, the route is sound rather than a conventional stage production.
Audio drama places particular weight on voices, timing and the relationship between speech and silence. Listeners build their own images of characters and places, making the experience distinct from watching actors within a visible set.
The presence of Jones and Tushingham gives the adaptation a named cast, while the discovery by Delaney’s daughter supplies the link between a surviving text and its new public form. The report does not establish that the play’s rediscovery changes the reputation of any earlier work; it adds material to a body of writing audiences can assess for themselves.
Catch Me Who Can also draws attention to the role of literary archives and family-held papers in an author’s afterlife. A script that remains outside regular performance can find a different audience when it is recovered and adapted, allowing a less familiar work to stand alongside an established title.
