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.
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.
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.