Playwright Mike Bartlett has an impressive track record when it comes to writing about how relationships can veer off course like a speedboat without a driver.
I’m still slightly haunted by his first play My Child (2007), which in Sacha Wares’s bold production placed the audience emotionally and physically in the bitter world of a couple fighting for custody of their son.
Now a top-tier stage and TV writer (Doctor Foster is among his biggest hits), Bartlett’s latest – a rare West End world premiere – reunites the creative team behind the daring three-cornered play Cock (2009) in which a gay man falls for a woman.
Directed by James Macdonald, Unicorn boasts a dream cast with Stephen Mangan and Nicola Walker (both of the TV series Split, appropriately enough) as Nick and Polly whose love for each other has not prevented their marriage from going stale.
Boredom is no longer an issue, however, when the flirtation between Polly, a poet and lecturer, and her 28-year-old sexually and socially savvy student Kate (the always excellent Erin Doherty) flares into an affair. Or it would if Polly were not concerned about betraying Nick. The answer is to explore the possibility of Kate joining the marriage.
Mangan is excellent as the bemused, then tempted Nick who is broken and remade into an altogether more attractive proposition for the women
It is not hard to see why, having previously explored the impact of one half of a gay couple being attracted to a heterosexual relationship, Bartlett now turns to heterosexual marriage where a spouse is interested in a gay affair. Yet the switch feels less transgressive here than it did in Cock and Bartlett turns to health crises and even the threat of a gathering war to feed his play with drama. However, these cracks are well covered by a top-quality cast.
Mangan is excellent as the bemused, then tempted Nick who is broken and remade into an altogether more attractive proposition for the women. Meanwhile, Walker’s Polly conveys the make-or-break urgency of someone frightened by the banality of her life. And the fast-rising star Doherty – currently starring in the series A Thousand Blows – delivers yet another superb performance as Kate. She casually embodies a generational change of attitude toward sex that sees desire as a thing to be embraced rather than suppressed.
Though the evening is by no mean flawless it is funny, thought-provoking and very entertaining.
Unicorn
Garrick Theatre
★★★★★
