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New Moon is nothing if not an international advertisement for the hungry virtues of virginity and young people can’t get enough of it
The Twilight Saga: New Moon
Theatre
A smart, prickly and rewarding view of sexual and emotional confusion
Cock
Restaurants
Kitchen W8 is a bargain for this area, if such sophistication is what you crave
Kitchen W8
Too long and drawn out but very entertaining with excellent special effects
This is a peculiar play and does not work for me. Some of it is very funny but there are real flaws
Alex has a strong powerful voice and was faultless, she is far better now than she was on the X-Factor
London,
Nicholas de Jongh's rating
Reader rating
Dir: Clare Lizzimore.
Cast: Nick Caldecott, Charlotte Emmerson, Tracy-Ann Oberman, Ed Stoppard
Description: A comic drama based on true events, written by Amy Rosenthal. DH Lawrence and his wife ask Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry to join their holiday, yet the latter couple's strifes are soon revealed. Directed by Clare Lizzimore.
Trains: Tube: Swiss Cottage 
Phone: 0207722 9301
Website: www.hampsteadtheatre.com
Man of vision: DH Lawrence (Ed Stoppard) tries to convince his wife Frieda (Tracy-Ann Oberman) of the merits of a menage a quatre
There is a ridiculous but characteristic moment in Amy Rosenthal's psychologically naive play about DH Lawrence's disappointments when he tried to found a ménage à quatre on the Cornish coast in 1916: the famous writer flourishes a carrot in front of his bemused friend, literary critic John Middleton Murry, who to Lawrence's disappointment fails to identify the vegetable as either sex symbol or phallic object.
This incident encapsulates the failure of On the Rocks. Miss Rosenthal has created an old-fashioned marriage comedy from material quite resistant to such colouring or simplification. Lawrence's erotic longing for Murry, a desire whose nature he misrepresented to himself and which helped inspired his great novel Women in Love, caused both men's partners unhappiness and jealousy.
In 13, not well co-ordinated scenes Miss Rosenthal traces the course of a failed experiment in living when Murry and his lover, New Zealand short-story writer, Katherine Mansfield, come to live next door to Lawrence and his German wife Frieda.
Designer Paul Burgess conjures up two, abutting, oddly unlife-like cottages. Charlotte Emmerson's excellent Katherine, all bleak, tense watchfulness at her upstairs desk, loathes the isolated environment, finds herself unable to write and then neglected by Murry, who goes off for long, daily walks with Lawrence.
Miss Rosenthal never captures the sadness of this sublimated, unacknowledged passion, nor does she catch its conflicted complexity. On one crucial occasion Lawrence strips naked and wants to persuade Nick Caldecott's Murry, who removes his three-piece suit and displays a thick layer of embarrassment, to wrestle with him. In another, while the two men lay a carpet, Lawrence tries to interest Murry in an odd rite of blood-brotherhood that involves self-harming.
Both scenes, in a production by Clare Lizzimore that lays undue stress on jocularity, render the two men comically absurd, even though Ed Stoppard makes a fine, convincing Lawrence, his volatile moods and rages apparent symptoms of emotional disturbance.
But Caldecott, miscast as Murry, bears the trappings of a prim vicar, transported from a Ben Travers farce. Lawrence's relations with Frieda, in real life clearly sado-masochistic and hampered by impotence, are here simplified into outbursts of physical abuse, followed by unbelievable bouts of sexual abandon. Tracy-Ann Oberman's Frieda, speaking in an often unintelligible German accent, revels in aggressive self-pity - another case of Rosenthal's simplifications.
Until 26 July (020 7722 9301)
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
I loved this play. I thought it was delightfully funny and good clean fun! It seems unfair to pick out any of the actors as they were all so good and so generous in their performances, but Nick Caldecott was superb as the diffident, tender Jack Middelton Murry and Charlotte Emmerson was wonderfully understated and moving as Katherine. The writer, Amy Rosenthal, serves up a delicious broth of laughter and tears. I look forward to her next play very much. All in all, a special night in the theatre.
- Phillipa Desmond, Rottingdean, Sussex
Did we watch the same production? I saw this last week during one of its initial previews and found it to be funny, insightful and an interesting as a new work. I thoroughly disagree with this review.
- Andy, London
