Unicorn

Mike Bartlett’s new play Unicorn, now playing at the Garrick Theatre promises both comedy and drama as it tackles the intersection of modern love, age gaps, and the evolving nature of intimacy with a star cast of Steve Mangan, Nicola Walker and Erin Doherty.

If you talk to anyone under thirty, polyamorous relationships are just another approach to sex and romance, albeit non-traditional. But Bartlet has chosen to write his new play about a frustrated middle-aged couple, Polly and Nick, a doctor and lecturer who embark on a throuple to stave off marital boredom. Steve Mangan and Nicola Walker, already an established married couple from TV hit ‘The Split,’ are warm and familiar as they panic their way into intimacy with their much younger ‘unicorn’. Kate (Erin Doherty), sparkling with youth is twenty-eight when they first meet, pours forth gen Z wisdom in the face of their extreme awkwardness.

Unicorn, in the world of polyamory is a single female willing to have a relationship with an established couple. Very unusual. And to the detriment of the drama, it does feel, highly unlikely. The awkwardness between the characters is palpable, but the chemistry between them—despite its potential—never fully ignites on stage.

The entire play consists of fairly short scenes alternating between two and three handers set over a period of two years. The rarely get off the sofa but they talk and talk. Barlett’s power is in his observational comedy and there are some laugh out loud, sometimes brilliant speeches about contemporary ills; the climate crisis (apocalyptic), the prospects for artists these days (none), aging (ugly), cancer (more of it than there was), toxic masculinity (straight men aren’t fun at parties) and death (losing your parents is a big deal). It’s quite emphatically despairing when it’s not being funny and the moral of the story seems to be, that you may as well have an alternative relationship as being bored alone or dead is the other option. And as nobody’s judging here, why on earth not?

While Bartlett’s insights into contemporary life are often biting, Unicorn struggles to maintain momentum, becoming less an exploration of polyamory than an observation of how even the most experimental relationships can descend into the mundanity they seek to escape.