Take two couples

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. He loves the attention of the Bloomsbury set. She despises him for loving their attention. He rhapsodises about creating a community based on love and creativity and she breaks a casserole dish over his head.

The storms are cyclical. Minor bickering escalates into rage, which erupts into all-in-wrestling and finally the hostility dwindles back into the warm posset of sexual reconciliation. Inevitably Mansfield and Murry seem bloodless by comparison and one deduces that their presence in Cornwall was arranged partly in order to invigorate the Lawrences’ marriage with a frisson of exhibitionism. Lawrence chases Frieda around the stove shouting, ‘Come here, thou glorious Brünnhilde, thou Teutonic monument, thou luscious Hunwife,’ while Murry and Mansfield, white-faced and tight-lipped, retreat to their room to enjoy Keats and sardines in bed.

There are numerous perils with staging this sort of material — parody, irrelevance, pretentiousness and absurdity — but Rosenthal avoids all such traps.