What a relief. After a splurge of jetted-in celebrity casting, here are two new plays buoyed up by on-the-spot, on-the-button stage actors. Every Mike Bartlett drama requires a particular dexterity from its performers. Think of Ben Whishaw’s intricacy in the first production of Cock (2009), or Tim Pigott-Smith’s satiric skill with iambic pentameter in King Charles III (2014). In Unicorn, a terrific trio of actors – Erin Doherty, Stephen Mangan and Nicola Walker – are required to hover between lightness and pain. They have to make an explosive proposition seem not only plausible but promising. They need to register, with minimal action, considerable change in the course of two and a half hours. They rise to the challenge.
Despite the twinkling title, there is nothing fey about this drama. Bartlett invites the audience to dismantle the traditional idea of marriage. Unicorn here refers to a person (a rare one) who wants to have sex and perhaps love with an established couple. Doherty, the actor formerly known as Princess Anne in The Crown, is that person: a gleaming, inquisitive, casually knowing young woman who is invited to join, in and out of bed, a comfortably married duo staring at their middle years: “We call it age but really it’s the early symptoms of dying.” Mangan and Walker reunite after The Split: he plays an unsettled ENT doctor, with concertina limbs and lopsided smile; she is a poet and teacher who rushes at everything in a flurry of words and excitable hands.
I have rarely seen actors change from within so subtly and definitively. Doherty becomes harder though still hopeful; Walker stops whirring and settles into stillness; Mangan stops lounging and consolidates. Together they humanise what at first appears as a mechanical arrangement – an updated swingers notion. They are also at ease with Bartlett’s humane but tacked-on expansion of his theme into future hope.
The action is clear and witty. James Macdonald – Caryl Churchill’s director of choice – excels in making an event from shard-like scenes. There is no hiding place in Miriam Buether’s sleek design: a hemisphere, like a glamper’s tent or a half-open parachute, ringed by neon – smart but provisional. Between scenes, versions of the old song Daisy Bell – folksy, jazzy, punky – are sung. To ironic effect. No third person was invited on that bicycle built for two.
Churchill in Moscow is the fastest-selling show in the history of the snug but not smug Orange Tree theatre. It is the latest smart move by artistic director Tom Littler, who stages Howard Brenton’s new play with panache, combining two sure-fire box-office draws – the name of Churchill and the person of Roger Allam.
Brenton is forever haloed by the notorious lawsuit brought in 1982 against his “obscene” Romans in Britain by Mary Whitehouse. Yet his new play is unlikely to frighten the horses, or even the Tories.
The pivot is piquant: a meeting between Stalin and Churchill in 1942, occasioned by the PM’s wish to break in person the news that, with the Nazis at the gates of Stalingrad, the allies planned to open a second front not in Europe but north Africa. The production is trenchant: Cat Fuller’s design sets the action, gusted along with blasts of martial brass, on a red sunburst floor with a black centre.
The performances are the real pull. As Stalin, Peter Forbes swaggers persuasively in big boots and a Devonian accent (the equivalent of Georgian), his eyes narrow and swivelling. Magnificent Allam has the Churchillian pipe, siren suit, bald pate and jutting lower lip but does not imitate the barking, stumping or pauses. As an actor who can make modesty, such as Fred Thursday’s in Endeavour, seem commanding, and always suggests subterranean schisms, he spills over with entitlement, anger and petulance; every phrase a rumble.
For all its historical fascination, psychologically Brenton’s is a broad-brush account: mighty men behaving like giant toddlers, rolling around together as if in a sandpit with drink and sucking-pig; it is striking that Churchill calling Uncle Joe a Georgian peasant is thought to be a witticism. An approximate feminism frames the action. Two translators – both actually secret service agents, played with sardonic aplomb by Jo Herbert and Elisabeth Snegir – are encouraged to offer free versions of what they hear, in the interests of keeping the talks going: they are the wise ones, aware that what is not said is as important as any utterance.
The last word also goes to a woman: Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana, who defected to the US in 1967. She has patrolled the action as a young girl, cutely asking Churchill to sign her copy of David Copperfield. Is Brenton implying a hidden subversive message? The nickname of Dickens’s hero was Trot.
Star ratings (out of five)
Unicorn ★★★★
Churchill in Moscow ★★★
Unicorn is at the Garrick, London, until 26 April
Churchill in Moscow is at the Orange Tree theatre, Richmond, Surrey until 8 March
