William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe on stage: has the West End undergone a sudden startling shift from the commercial to the cerebral? Not quite in the way you might think, although the august Royal Shakespeare Company has indeed taken up residence in one of the capital’s premier playhouses. Shakespeare and Marlowe are instead the central – and indeed the only – characters in American writer Liz Duffy Adams’s exploration of creativity, rivalry and subterfuge.
Born With Teeth is, without doubt, the sort of drama that would sit more comfortably in Stratford upon Avon than the West End and is in London for one reason only: the star wattage of Doctor Who himself, Ncuti Gatwa, as the mischief-making Marlowe. I’m delighted to report that Gatwa is in his swashbuckling element here, infinitely more compelling than he was in The Importance of Being Earnest at the National last year. Gatwa’s Marlowe swishes his cape with insouciance and brandishes a quill pen like a sword, leaving us in no doubt that it is he, rather than Shakespeare (Edward Bluemel), who is the superstar playwright here. When the latter ventures to point out that the pair are in fact the same age, Marlowe is ready with a withering put-down: “Not in stage years”.
In recent times, academic computer analysis of the texts has confirmed that Marlowe contributed to all three of Shakespeare’s Henry VI plays. Duffy Adams takes that as her central premise, offering us three acts, starting in 1591, of a volatile and sexually charged Elizabethan writers’ room, energetically conveyed in Daniel Evans’s production. Shakespeare is industrious and law-abiding while Marlowe, an outrageous flirt with a penchant for risk-taking, most certainly is not. “There’s not enough money in theatre, not nearly enough”, he laments in a manner that would draw the applause of solidarity from the playwrights of 2025, which means that he has involved himself in the murky world of espionage and the queen’s secret services.
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A working knowledge of Henry VI would be a benefit for audience members, as would background understanding of the combustible state of the country in the 1590s, as religious tensions perpetually threaten to boil over and an ageing, heir-less queen causes grave consternation about England’s future. The build-up to the denouement – don’t forget that Marlowe died in 1593 – feels rushed and under-explained, although we understand from Shakespeare’s sudden improved quality of jacket that he is a man on the up, the one who is going places in the showbiz world. Bluemel gives an understated performance of someone growing in confidence, growing into themselves, whereas Gatwa’s Marlowe is a flame that burns with explosive brightness and is then extinguished.
To 1 November (BornWithTeethPlay.com)
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