This is the time of year when couples who have arranged to go on holiday together suddenly have a moment’s doubt about the wisdom of the enterprise. A trip to Amy Rosenthal’s new play might be therapeutic. For no matter how frosty the atmosphere might become over the cooking rota, it surely cannot be as grisly as the experiment in communal living on view here.

Rosenthal explores the fractious period that ensued when DH Lawrence invited Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry to join him and his wife, Frieda, to form a writers’ community in Zennor, Cornwall, in 1916. For Lawrence it was a move towards “Rananim”, his vision of utopia, but, as Rosenthal skilfully illuminates, he seems not to have realised that a utopia determined by his vision was unlikely to flourish.