'Unicorn' review — Mike Bartlett's gloriously funny new comedy uses a throuple to ask teasing questions about modern relationships

Read our review of Unicorn, starring Nicola Walker, Stephen Mangan and Erin Doherty, now in performances at the Garrick Theatre to 26 April.

Three’s company in Mike Bartlett’s gloriously funny and deeply empathetic new comedy. Fiftysomething married parents Nick and Polly decide to spice up their dwindling sex life by inviting a third person, 28-year-old Kate, into the bedroom (she is the titular “unicorn” in throuple parlance). But this spicy premise grows into a profound meditation on relationships, ageing, honesty, and our capacity to change.

Bartlett has enormous fun with the sheer awkwardness of this polite middle-class couple entering into an unfamiliar erotic situation. His cringe comedy is ideally served by Nicola Walker and Stephen Mangan, who previously played a couple in TV show The Split and are wonderfully believable spouses. You buy into their long history and so fully understand the stakes of this gamble.

Polly is more able to bluntly articulate her sexual boredom. What makes her feel alive is an encounter with her mature student Kate (Polly is a poet and teacher). But the fretful Nick, as Kate astutely deserves, struggles to express his feelings, vacillating between courteous diffidence and flashes of assertiveness.

Initially the scenes are all two-handers, contrasting the cosiness of Nick and Polly’s dynamic with the electric charge they each have with Kate. When she kisses Polly, Walker melts as though her spine has turned to jelly. Nick gawps at her filthy frankness – Kate says admiringly of Polly: “I’d be happy just to fuck her neck.” Soon the conversation turns X-rated, steamy fantasies of dominance and bodily fluids laid bare.

But those hoping for a full-on carnal romp will be disappointed: Bartlett is a tease in that respect. (Although, memorably, you do get to hear Mangan utter the unlikely words “butt play”.) Instead, the focus is on the nature of intimacy, the vital importance of communication, and the tension between what we may need – change and development within a long marriage, just as we have in all other areas of our lives – and the shame that society still attaches to any deviation from the norm.

Bartlett provocatively poses the thesis that it’s surely better to share and do so honestly than to betray your spouse with lies and secret infidelity. There’s a split in generational attitudes here, with Kate calmly open to new ideas, although Polly also gets a wistful speech about pre-internet romance. Opening the night before Valentine’s Day, this promises to spark heated post-show discussions about contemporary relationships.

There is also cracking observational humour around ageing (like getting to the stage where you start working out if you’re older than the objects around you), and class judgement: Polly compares the panicked preparation ahead of their threesome with tidying up your house before a new cleaner arrives.

Walker is a fierce joy as Polly, barrelling through roller-coaster monologues in which she talks herself in and out of her desires. Mangan is unsurpassable at that very British self-deprecating discomfort: witness his horror when, trying to sound hip, he praises Kate’s “clobber”. Erin Doherty lends Kate an effective cool self-assurance, although all three later exhibit raw vulnerability.

Miriam Buether’s minimalist set is like a glamping canopy, in which the upstage blinds are only raised when the trio is together. It’s a heavy-handed touch in James Macdonald’s otherwise deftly directed production.

I was also in two minds about the play’s swerve into state-of-the-nation (digs at everything from entrenched capitalism and political gloom to toxic masculinity) and climate apocalypse territory, though the latter does support Bartlett’s through-line juxtaposing life-affirming passion with mortality. If we’re only here for a short time, shouldn’t we find what truly makes us happy? That is the real unicorn.

Unicorn is at the Garrick Theatre to 26 April. Book Unicorn tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk

Photo credit: Unicorn (Photos by Marc Brenner)