On The Rocks - TNT

Amy Rosenthal has obviously done her research into the time that D.H. Lawrence and his German wife Frieda spent living in an isolated Cornish village during the First Wold War. Her comic new play reveals not only their turbulent domesticity but also their relationship with the close literary friends — New Zealand born short storywriter Katherine Mansfield and her future husband, critic and editor John Middleton Murry — whom Lawrence persuaded to rent the cottage next door in an attempt to fulfil his vision of a communal utopia of artists.
While he and Tracy-Ann Oberman's earthy, red-stockinged Frieda fight violently (then patch things up with equal vigour in the bedroom and on the kitchen floor), their companions are painted in much more subdued colours. Mansfield, her voice tight and unhappy in Charlotte Emmerson's performance, is on the verge of depression and unable to write. And Nick Caldecott's fastidious Murry is far too inhibited to abandon himself to any sort of fleshly contact — let alone the near-naked wrestling bout which Ed Stoppard's passionate, insulting, control freak Lawrence forces on him.
But, after what the programme reveals to be an incredibly long gestation period, it's a shame that Rosenthal hasn't quite managed to distil all that information into something tighter, funnier and consistently more involving than Clare Lizzimore's production proves to be.
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