Asterisk denotes entries on real places.
*Salford.
Helen and Jo’s flat. Described in Delaney’s stage directions as “comfortless,” the semifurnished apartment that Helen, an alcoholic “semi-whore,” has rented for herself and her teenage daughter, Jo, is the latest in a series of such rooms that they have occupied, each cheaper and tawdrier than the one before. It has only one bed, and Helen acknowledges that “everything in it’s falling apart . . . and we’ve no heating–but there’s a lovely view of the gasworks, we share a bathroom with the community and this wallpaper’s contemporary.” The stage set also includes a portion of the street outside the apartment building, where Jo’s boyfriend, “a coloured naval rating,” proposes marriage to her.
Jo notes that fifty thousand people live in tenements near the cemetery and a slaughterhouse. Scenes of such urban squalor had rarely been depicted realistically on the English stage before this play. They were in stark contrast to the middle-and upper-class elegance of then-popular plays by Noel Coward and others. This flat is considerably worse than the apartment in John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, another working-class drama that premiered in 1956 and was also set in the English Midlands. Like the readers of Émile Zola’s novels more than six decades earlier, London theatergoers were shocked but also intrigued by the urban naturalism of Delaney’s setting, her lower-class characters, and the grim events that transpire among them.