A TRICYCLE MADE FOR THREE?
After Mike Bartlett’s COCK – where one of a gay male couple falls for a girl – I wrote that the poor sap of a hero thinks he he choosing a sexuality but is actually just choosing between people. The woman is gentler towards him. It’s our USP. This time, in a premiere already sold out, Bartlett returns to the essential subject of intimacy in an age obsessed with physical sex, this time with more seriousness about mores and moralities beneath his characteristic wickedly-perceptive dialogue.
It’s simple enough: Polly is a poet, lecturer and restless wife, feeling stuck in a very ordinary pleasant 25 year marriage. Perimenopausal, I’d say, though the word is never spoken. She finds herself almost inadvertently flirting with a student, Kate :“look at you – fresh and ripe”. The draw of rose-white youth tends to get to us at that stage, once our necks start wrinkling. Back home Nick, lounging and yawning on the sofa, doesn’t feel like sex with his freshly aroused spouse, jokes obligingly that he ””could probably get some blood down there” if she insists. Both laugh and admit, cosily, their mutual boredom with good old marital coupling. But then she suggests to his shock that they bring in something which newspaper feature-writers and their exhibitionist subjects call a “unicorn”: an unattached younger woman wanting to be girlfriend to both. A throuple!
Kate, a rather dour cross issue-fixated Gen Z+ (about 28) is up for it . Nick, aware of his status as a middle aged ENT doctor, good husband and father, has qualms. A series of scenes follows: him meeting Kate for an excruciatingly embarrassing discussion of what might be what, she alarming him with her experienced youthful explicitness, him worrying it might “seem” he was ‘grooming’, her. She laughs and mocks him; reporting back to Polly, the pair attempt a kiss, shocked by their daring. Kate, ignoring the workaday ENT specialism, fantasises that it’ll be like “sleeping with Sylvia Plath AND Ted Hughes”. They plan for a hotel room, talk a lot, panic. Nick admits he’s talked it over with his friend Tom : Polly then does a pitch-perfect impression of what Tom would say – don’t risk your marriage, always ends up wrong, all that. Nick admits er, yes, he did. Panics. It can’t happen.
On it goes; no spoilers, but two years and a separation happen in the interval, before it all becomess oddly rather beautiful, sex at last retreating to where it belongs, tucked within human intimacy and loyalty and trust, animal closeness to ward off mortality and fear of a fracturing society and culture “where a laminated sign saying ‘be kind’ has replaced justice and fairness” .
It’s often hootingly funny: sex being the potentially absurd McGuffin that it is, and the three players are superb because each spills over into real individuality , which stops them being irritating symbols of anything. Polly in fact recoils in horror at the risk of their threesome being a trend or worse, a “community”.
Nicola Walker is exactly right, edging her familiar “responsible decent matronly” image with a real edge of eccentric out-of-control desperation, her bolt for new freedom suddenly knocked to the ground by the separation and the responsibility of their poor children. Stephen Mangan, gangling , clever, a bit dishevelled, nicely works out Nick’s contradictions of modern blokehood (“one of the two women introduced me to butt play” he says when confessing an affair. His wife stares in horror. Kate nods ‘awesome’). His body language is perfect: sprawling with his wife, then perched tense-legged on a bar stool when confronted with the tough Kate. Who is Erin Doherty, determinedly unsexy despite her explicitness, expressing in ruthless modern-cockney tones her ruthless deadpan contempt for the world and values of her elders – climate, Ukraine, NHS, the lot. The fact that she’s frankly a bit of a bore is alleviated by some lovely expressions of that contempt: on Nick’s midlife crisis she observes “ he’s taken up kayaking. Told him to find an outlet for his masculine violence and that’s what he came up with”. A man near me almost choked with rueful recognition.
This is all set by Miriam Buether in a sort of bubble or tent, into which chairs, a sofa, a big hotel bed, and two different benches appear during brief blackouts. Between scenes come snatches of a raucous music-hall “Daisy daisy, gimme your answer do” . Just to remind us of the ancient, convenient, possibly fragile convention of loving only in pairs. It’s quite clever, quite sad. And in the end, yes, redemptively admits that what will remain of us is love.
boxoffice ticketing.nimaxtheatres.com. to. 25 April
rating 3
theatreCat 