Love On The Dole
by Walter Greenwood and Ronald Gow
by Walter Greenwood and Ronald Gow
Love on the Dole is a poignant drama set in 1930s Salford that explores the struggles of a family coping with poverty during the Great Depression.
About The Play
About The Play
★★★★ Four Stars, The Evening Standard
★★★★ Four Stars, TNT
1930. Salford. The Great Depression has taken hold and mass unemployment threatens to devastate the residents of Hanky Park. With their father out of work, the burden of keeping the family together falls to Sally Hardcastle and her brother, Harry, as they desperately fight to break free from the shackles of poverty.
Strikingly poignant and now more relevant than ever, Love on the Dole is both a cry of outrage and a celebration of love, hope and the strength of the human spirit.
Love on the Dole was first performed at the Manchester Repertory Theatre in 1934 where one critic said it had been “conceived and written in blood.” It toured Britain with two separate companies, playing up to three performances a day, sometimes in cinemas in towns which had no theatre. A million people had seen it by the end of 1935. Runs in London, New York and Paris followed. It was filmed in 1941 (the British Board of Film Censors would not allow a film to be made during the 1930s as they regarded it too “dangerous”) and was even adapted into a musical. It was voted one of the National Theatre’s One Hundred Plays of the Century in 2000.