Set over one day and evening in a working-class Manchester pub, the play focuses on the relationships between the landlord Harry Boothroyd, barmaid Sally Earnshaw and the domineering Ada Thorpe and her family, during the growing prosperity of the postwar economic boom.
Saturday Night at the Crown is inspired by the the 1959 novel by Walter Greenwood, with a working-class theme much like his most famous work Love on the Dole. The play premiered in Morecambe in 1954 before running for 234 performances at the Garrick Theatre in London's West End from 1957 to 1958.