Abstract

The multi-spatial landscape of the North-West of England (Manchester-Salford and the surrounding area) provides the setting for Walter Greenwood's 1934 play 'Love on the Dole'. Both the urban industrialized cityscape and the rural countryside that surrounds it are vital framing devices for the narrative - these spaces not simply acting as backdrops but taking on character roles. Ugliness and beauty, capitalist hegemony and socialistic hopefulness reside simultaneously in this important under-researched example of twentieth-century British theatre, thereby reflecting the ambivalent, shifting landscape of the North and producing a play that cannot be easily defined artistically or politically.