Unicorn

(seen at the afternoon performance on 27th February 2025)

Rachael Heyhoe-Flint, the cricketer, once appeared on Channel 4 classic quiz “Countdown” as a celebrity presenter. She was allotted the usual 3 minutes before the advertisement break. Most celebrities take that time to deliver a single poem or witty remark or two. 

Heyhoe-Flint spewed a whole string of random jokes and material – at breakneck speed. The effect was embarrassing as nobody could make any connection and she burned through what others use in their whole week, in that single segment.

Mike Bartlett’s play feels like he has done something very similar. This could have been titled "Three Characters in Search of an Orgy," but equally “Three People in a Boat” as they are all at sea.

It is never clear what Bartlett is trying to explore. Intergenerational relationships? The state of British love in an internet porn age? The decline of the professional classes? Information overload in digital times? A diatribe against middle-aged men is particularly lazy, clumsy and distasteful in the second act, and he should have known better. 

He is also either prudish or schoolboy in his discussions of sex, a shame when he is capable of the odd, good line like “love child of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.”

In front of an eyelid shell, sometimes on an orange sofa you could love for colour and texture if not comfort (Miriam Buether), sometimes painted with light (Natasha Chivers, fine work) a professional couple – Nick (Stephen Mangan) a doctor, Polly (Nicola Walker) poet and English Lecturer – hook up with her willing 28-year-old student Kate (Erin Doherty) for a threesome leading to becoming a thrupple.

We have to ignore the flawed scenario, in that the professionals would wish to protect their livelihoods and the crass, automatic, assumption that their “unicorn” (the rarest of things, a woman willing to enter into a relationship with a couple) would have to be “working class.” 

Further credibility is lost when Kate speaks of "getting a ‘profession’ and eschewing art in order to make money. Newsflash, without connections to get a pupillage, most aspiring barristers never get there and just accrue debt. If Bartlett is so clued-up, he really missed that one.

What is credible are the performances. As you would expect, an all-star, highly experienced cast deliver what they are given to the very best of their combined abilities.

The opening scene between Walker and Doherty sets the tone. The dialogue itself may be contrived, but the pair find a way to make real the unlikely connection and scenario to come.

Mangan is good at demonstrating “involved” as well. His own early scenes are surprisingly written as quite detached, but he emerges as the most enthusiastic of all, in his own way. Encumbered with yet another clumsy sub-plot, he emerges unscathed.

There is plenty of “how” in this play, but little “why.” Is a couple bored on their anniversary really enough to support the entire sequence of events?

Adding the number of compelling side-commentaries which remain unexplored, this rather quickly written-to-staged play may have benefitted from a far longer development as a series of smaller playlets with some interconnection.

As it stands, this is less a unicorn than a rather common pit pony of a piece, fortunately with expert grooms able to make the most of what they have.