On the Rocks
Hampstead
In My Name
Trafalgar Studios
All Nudity Shall Be Punished
Union
Uh oh. Writers writing about writers writing. Amy Rosenthal’s new play is set in 1916 in a Cornish village. D.H. Lawrence, suffering from writer’s block, has suggested to the publisher John Middleton Murry and his lover Katherine Mansfield, who is also blocked, that they rent adjoining cottages. This promises to be a meagre, literary love-in but the play succeeds extremely well, even for a sceptic like me who remains unconvinced by Lawrence’s obese sentiment-laden novels. (My preference is for the eerie, formless and completely masterful late poems like ‘The Mosquito’ and ‘Baby Tortoise’). The show’s centrepiece is Lawrence’s krakatoan relationship with his German wife, Frieda. They are ill-matched and yet perfectly matched. He’s as thin as a stair-rod, she’s as fat as a bus tyre. He grows vegetables and admires them, she bakes cakes and wolfs them down.
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