Unicorn play review: Mike Bartlett as sharp as ever with Stephen Mangan throuple play
Unicorn play review and star rating: ★★★★
Through plays like King Charles III and Cock, Mike Bartlett has delivered some of the freshest-feeling contemporary writing about the way we live our lives today, particularly to do with sexuality and dating.
Cock with Jonathan Bailey became one of the hardest tickets to land in the West End in 2023. Bartlett’s piece about bisexuality and labelling had only two people in its cast, but tickets went for up to £400, making it (controversially) one of the most expensive plays in West End history.
Unicorn is classically Bartlett in that it features some of the sharpest writing on in the West End right now, if not ever, and, like the trend for contemporary British dining in restaurants, would probably describe itself as “fuss free”: a triplet of good actors playing interesting people delivering interesting lines. That’s how Bartlett likes it, and in Unicorn he shows there is more fuel to the formula yet.
Unicorn play: Stephen Mangan delivers lines knowing how ridiculous they sound
Those three good actors are Stephen Mangan, Erin Doherty and Nicola Walker. They have the sort of chemistry you’d jolly well hope to see when three of the finest British acting talents are lumped together on one stage. Mangan plays Nick, husband to Walker’s Polly, who are married but admit they’ve grown bored of one another. Walker seeks distraction in Kate, a twenty-something barrister who seems to have a penchant for older people no matter their sex. That’s where Mangan comes in, and the three consensually date one another – or try to, until inevitably there’s freak out moments when Nick and Polly question what on Earth they’re playing at.
In the hands of another writer, this’d probably be baggy nonsense, but Bartlett’s writing screams with contemporaneity. “You realise you’re older than objects. Whole buildings have been knocked down,” says Kate of her advancing years. With ageing comes the realisation that they might not have much time left. “People just want to fuck each other, don’t they, often.”
The analysis is often hilarious. Heterosexual men are “not silverback fuck machines but debt ridden sexual predators,” says Mangan, who delivers the line knowing how ridiculous it sounds, almost playing the gorilla as he says it. Walker gives Dawn French levels of farce with her hilariously exaggerated mouth movements whenever she’s arguing, but neither really know what they want (who does?) “You need to know you are something — in your own right,” chips in Kate.
By the second act I was kind of starting to wonder whether Bartlett should have kicked off this rumination with the trio already experimenting as a throuple rather than wondering whether they should. I’m not sure I’ve seen a throuple on stage before, but eventually legs are intertwined and the tension builds.
It could build into something a little more edge-of-your seat; while the language stings and the conversations feel truthful and hugely relevant (the throuple never feel entirely happy, and without templates to look up to, they imply, how can they be?) but Unicorn ends as a satisfying one to think about thematically, rather than having delivered a fully knockout story. Still, Bartlett remains untouchable for delivering these singular visions on how we find love.
Mike Bartlett’s Unicorn play is on at the Garrick Theatre until 26 April