Unicorn – Garrick Theatre, London

Writer: Mike Bartlett

Director: James Macdonald

There’s nothing really new about Mike Bartlett’s new play about polygamy. Queer people have been living in such non-traditional partnerships for decades, not to mention other countries where having more than one wife is embedded into the culture. Open relationships and permanent threesomes (“threes”) are considered normal in queer and Bohemian circles. However, Unicorn’s Kate, the woman who’s admitted into the marriage of Polly and Nick, views their set-up as new and truly revolutionary. But in effect she’s reinventing the wheel.

Polly and Nick live in the South of England, probably London. She’s a successful poet but makes her money teaching students. Her poetry is honest and straightforward. Ex-student Kate tells her that she is the “poet of the supermarket café”. Kate says it as a compliment and Polly takes it as such. Nevertheless, the audience may suspect that Polly’s verse isn’t so good.

If Polly and Kate’s mutual attraction is based on the mind and the “soul’ then Nick and Kate’s desire for each other initially seems to depend on the carnal. He tells her, with her consent of course, that he wants to sometimes use her as an object when they have sex. For all her wokeness, Kate calmly agrees.

But if the three were to enter into this three-way partnership, Polly worries about what the neighbours would think, and how their children would react. Nick’s greatest fear is that he would eventually be excluded and that his marriage, and the vows he spoke at the wedding, would crumble. The three need to have many conversations to decide if this polygamous arrangement is workable.

These discussions make up the entirety of the play and over the two hours, you can’t help but wish they would hurry up and make their minds up. The shortish scenes show them debating in pairs and when the three of them are present, set designer Miriam Buether’s elegant cocoon-like oval structure opens up to demonstrate the potential that a throuple could have.

Fortunately, these negotiations are often very funny, especially when Nick and Polly lament their youth. “Ageing is one of the early symptoms of death,” one of them remarks while Polly sees Kate as “fresh’ and “ripe”. Nicola Walker and Stephen Mangan are excellent as the married couple. Walker’s Polly is bright and breezy when Mangan’s Nick is more wary of the enfolding situation. Mangan often gets the laughs from just a hangdog expression.

Erin Doherty’s Kate is full of youthful optimism – the attribute that attracts Polly the most – and energetic resolve that their unusual relationship will have political power. When we meet her in the second half, almost two years later, that trust in a better future has been worn away. Age and capitalism have got the better of her. You can barely see the old Kate at all.

For the most part, Unicorn is lightweight froth but as jealousies and cancer scares emerge, Bartlett firmly places his story in the here-and-now to make a scathing attack on the recent Tory Government. It’s a leftfield surprise, but it certainly silences the audience. A little too late, perhaps, to turn this comedy of manners into a biting political satire.

Runs until 26 April 2025