In Mike Bartlett’s new play, the titular unicorn (current lingo for someone ready to be a third party joining a couple for sex and so called because of their rarity) is Kate, 28, a mature student whom we first see being chatted up by course teacher Polly, married with children, who, though loving her husband, feels the spark has gone out of their sex life.
Polly had a lesbian relationship among her pre-marital affairs and now, finding Kate attractive, wonders if involving a third person would spice up their marriage and presents the idea to her ENT doctor husband Nick.
Nicola Walker and Stephen Mangan, who have already played a couple in marital crisis in TV’s The Split, again make a plausible pair with a problem as Polly and Nick. She is a poet, but not (as she tells Kate) one of the nine in the country who make a living at it, and an age where you begin to wonder if you are older than things around you. As a teacher, she is well aware of the need to observe boundaries, not to touch without permission (and this play perhaps had a real need for its intimacy director), but Nicola Walker makes her positive and confident.
Husband Nick reluctantly goes along with his wife’s idea. As a doctor, he is probably as clued up about consent from his handling of patients but more worried, could they be accused of grooming? Stephen Mangan is a dab hand at playing embarrassment and is wonderfully awkward.
A series of short scenes chart developments from having the idea to putting it in practice, with the energy that Erin Doherty gives to motor-mouthed cockney Kate contrasting with Polly and Nick’s stalled middle-class, middle-life, but Bartlett doesn’t make her entirely convincing. Is it a joke or does she really mean it when she says she is training to be a barrister?
Though it comments on a wide range of issues—generational differences, getting old, politics—not just alternatives to sexual pairing, it doesn’t tell us a lot about these three apart from their sex lives; it is too busy being funny. The fact that it could be you doesn’t stop you laughing.
The second half, set after a gap of a couple of years when again it is thought that involving Kate might mend Polly and Nick’s marriage, gets decidedly darker, though the setting takes on more colour.
James Macdonald’s direction and Miriam Buether’s design emphasise the compact concentration into short scenes with a very simple staging under a fan-like half dome that isolates the sequence of duologues and only lifts for scenes involving all three participants. Relocations are marked by rapid changes of furniture (park bench, bar stools, sofa, bed) often with only room for two and made in eye-dazzled blackouts to verses from the old song “Daisy, Daisy” in changing gear. “A bicycle made for two” is indeed what it is all about.