Playwright Mike Bartlett’s impressively mercurial career has taken in everything from droll sci-fi epics to faux Shakespearean verse satires.
Much of his work is dizzyingly grandiose, but within it there’s a definite sub genre of pared-back, small-cast ‘relationship dramas’, notably Cock (about bisexuality) and Bull (bullying). Unicorn is in this tradition, being a stripped back three hander on the topic of polyamory.
Polly (Nicola Walker) and Nick (Steven Mangan) are a married couple in a middle aged rut. They both know this, but where he merely acknowledges it with wearily articulate horror, she has been out there flirting with Kate (Erin Doherty), a mature student of hers. Acknowledging the attraction but unwilling to cheat per se, she suggests Nick and Kate have a meeting with a view to bringing her into their marriage.
Let’s not get into specifics about how this all pans out. But the first half of the play pretty much ploughs the furrow that you think a play about polygamy by an irony-addicted English playwright might: it’s really a comedy about Polly and Nick’s innate English awkwardness and inability to commit to inviting Kate in. No three-ways please, we’re British.
It’s tartly amusing, but also cliche bound. While I’d say Bartlett’s eye for the foibles of middle-aged marriage is second to none, Kate feels mostly unbelievable, a hyper-confident 28-year-old with a total certainty about pretty much everything, who acts as a conveniently knowledgeable guide to Nick and Polly in these brave new worlds.
She explains the concept of a unicorn to them: a single woman fully willing to enter a hetero marriage is referred to as a unicorn because she is so astonishingly rare. But Kate explaining this only underscores how implausible she is as a character – she’s so rare a man had to invent her.
Not wishing to give too much away, but by the second half, things have changed, and the idea of a throuple as a relationship model is given deeper consideration. Which is interesting. But also tricky. Not wishing to offend any of my many throuple readers, but it’s always struck me that the sort of polyamory being discussed here is a niche lifestyle choice founded largely on horniness… make it too formal and you end up like those fringe Mormon types who have multiple wives for questionable reasons.
Giving polyamory due consideration as a model for living without making it look either frivolous or misogynist is a tricky balancing act that I’d say Bartlett pulls off reasonably well. But in doing so he makes it look so esoteric and complicated that it’s hard to feel genuinely provoked by it. This is hardly a call to arms to revamp our imperfect system of monogamy, just a mild subversion of middle-class relationship-drama cliches.
Which is fine. Bartlett wanted to write a comedy about polyamory and this is what a Mike Bartlett comedy about polyamory was always liable to look like – quizzically raising an eyebrow, displaying his open minded credentials and giving us a lot of great zingers, but not earnestly calling for sexual revolution.
James Macdonald is a good choice of director. If Unicorn is a million miles away from the works by Sarah Kane and Caryl Churchill he made his name with, then he has a toughness and refusal to kowtow to sitcom-style laugh milking that stands the play in good stead. Miriam Buether’s seashell-esque set is striking. Stark in silhouette but opalescent inside, it distantly, cheekily calls to mind Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus
And the actors are great fun. Walker’s blend of sardonic irreverence and curmudgeonly vivacity is a formula that’s very much her own. For all that Unicorn hinges on cliches about Englishness, it’s Walker’s gift for depicting extreme bluntness that actually gets the plot moving. Mangan is a low-key revelation as the depressed Nick – there’s some genuine grit here, and it’s certainly the least ‘I’m a TV comedy actor’ turn I’ve seen him give on a stage. And while Doherty does feel slightly saddled with the Manic Pixie Gen-Z role, she makes the most of it, her enthusiasm and openness is compelling. Crucially none of them are exactly sending it up and there’s no physical business beyond a bit of kissing. It’s a play about a meeting of minds first and foremost.
There are many sides to Mike Bartlett: this is his first play to go straight into the West End, and was doubtless written with that in mind. Unicorn is him playing with the idea of the commercial comedy. It’s pretty MOR! But there’s enough of a twinkle in its eye that it never feels entirely conventional.
