On the Rocks is a 2008 play written by Amy Rosenthal and directed by Clare Lizzimore about real events surrounding novelist, short story writer, poet and playwright D. H. Lawrence^[1] in the tiny village of Zennor in Cornwall in 1916 in the middle of World War I.^[2] It played at the Hampstead Theatre in London from 1 to 26 July 2008. It was shortlisted for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize in 2009.

Abstract

D. H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda are living a shaky relationship with the overpowering Frieda missing her children, whom she abandoned for the writer, and fighting with Lawrence. The local coastguards, also suspect that Frieda, a cousin of Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron air ace, is a German spy and is sending signals from the cliffs to U-boats in the channel. In these turbulent times, the Lawrences invite their best, and by now almost only remaining friends, the critic and editor John Middleton Murry and the short-story writer Katherine Mansfield to come and join them in the cottage.^[2] For Lawrence, this was a step on the road to his ideal of Rananim – a utopia where one could be happy with a group of friends.^[1] As things develop, Lawrence and Frieda engage in violent fights followed by love-making sessions on the floor. Lawrence suggests that Murry becomes his blood brother, while Mansfield has writer's block, a situation Rosenthal passed through for six years before writing this play. Mansfield, after an enforced intimacy with Frieda, puts an end to the social experiment, leaving Lawrence with a permanent sense of betrayal.^[1]

Cast

• Ed Stoppard as DH Lawrence
• Tracy-Ann Oberman as Frieda Lawrence, D.H. Lawrence's wife
• Nick Caldecott as John Middleton Murry
• Charlotte Emmerson as Katherine Mansfield

Personnel

• Director: Clare Lizzimore
• Writer: Amy Rosenthal
• Designer: Paul Burgess
• Lighting designer: Jon Clark
• Sound designer: Edward Lewis

References