Some 23,000 visitors tour Charleston farmhouse in East Sussex each year, scrutinising the economist John Maynard Keynes’s bedroom, the art critic Clive Bell’s study, the dining table around which guests such as Virginia Woolf argued and the room in which Woolf’s sister, the artist Vanessa Bell, died. The house has been carefully preserved as the rural outpost of the influential but controversial Bloomsbury set: the location of innovative writing, distinctive painting, much laughter, plenty of sex, many tears — and some torrid domestic scenes.
On a perfect late-summer day last September, one is being re-enacted downstairs in the garden room for the BBC’s new drama, Life in Squares. Eve Best, Dr O’Hara in Nurse Jackie, is Vanessa Bell. The young English actress Lucy