One Sunday morning I was at the screening of a Danish costume drama set in the 18th century in which the King was being quite nasty to his Queen for no apparent reason. About an hour into the film an elderly gentlemen among the small audience started shouting at the screen: 'Will you stop being so horrible to that women, she's done nothing to you'.

It was a surprising outburst and also quite amusing but I tell the story because about three quarters of the way through Nick Dear's play The Dark Earth and the Light Sky I felt like doing just that. First world war poet Edward Thomas (Pip Carter) whom the play is about may have been a talented writer - and you get flashes of it in the script - but he wasn't a very nice man.

His free-spirit, intelligent wife Helen (Hattie Morahan) doggedly supports and encourages him only to be rewarded with a barrage of insensitive remarks. He isn't even that nice to his friend, the American poet Robert Frost (Shaun Dooley) whom he spends a summer with.

Thomas starts the play having resigned from a job in the civil service he can't see the point of, supporting his family by writing book reviews but creatively he suffers from writer's block. It is only in meeting Frost and spending hours in his company, walking, observing and documenting the countryside he loves that, with encouragement, he finds his voice once again.

He's not a happy person and early on confesses to having had suicidal thoughts only the beauty of the spot he'd chosen preventing him. However, his lack of self-worth makes him prickly, sharp, critical and highly-insensitive. But there is only so far empathy for a tortured genius or troubled soul can stretch.