Born With Teeth
Verdict: It bites
Will we see two better star turns this year? I doubt it. As Winston Churchill might almost have said, Ncuti Gatwa, playing hell-raiser playwright Christopher Marlowe and Edward Bluemel, as a bashful William Shakespeare, have nothing to offer us but ‘blood, sweat, tears and… laughter’ in Liz Duffy Adams’ fascinating drama Born With Teeth,
Having all but stolen the show as Algernon Moncrieff in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance Of Being Earnest at the National Theatre last year, former Doctor Who and Sex Education star Gatwa has done it all over again.
This time he brings rock star swagger to the role of the notoriously promiscuous homosexual poet ‘Kit’ Marlowe, who bonked, drank and fought his way to an early grave at the age of 29 in 1693.
Gatwa is like a caged wildcat, prowling the boards in Elizabethan leathers, slinking around and over a trestle table and wooden stools. The only thing anchoring him to the stage is Bluemel’s initially nervy, starstruck ‘Will’: the target of Marlowe’s literary, social — and sexual — ambitions.
The occasion is a period writers’ room in which the pair are working on Shakespeare’s Henry VI trilogy — now widely believed to have been written by both men.
In that politically febrile period the stakes are sky high, One wrong word could spell torture and death in The Tower of London.
Ncuti Gatwa alongside Edward Bluemel in Born With Teeth
Ncuti and Edward attended the press night after party on Tuesday
But Adams is rightly more interested in the rivalry, mutual admiration and sexual tension between the pair.
Will fears that sex with Kit would be like petting a leopard — but that just sharpens Marlowe’s appetite.
Such is the intensity of their performances under a phalanx of lights on all sides, the two actors are literally dripping in sweat.
Bluemel’s blouse sticks to him as if in a Early Modern wet T-shirt competition, while Gatwa tears his off completely at one point — to reveal an eye-poppingly sculpted torso. Photography forbidden!
But even more impressive than his physique is Gatwa’s playfully feline disposition.
Yes, his character is prepared to betray friends and lovers to secure his fortune.
But beneath his callous front we discover a playful, mischievous side and, in due course, a tender and passionate nature that is impressed and moved by Shakespeare’s way with words.
And Bluemel in his turn, shows the Bard to be made of stronger stuff, having been knocked into shape by this game of Kit and mouse.
Born with Teeth is a play by Liz Duffy Adams about the relationship between playwrights William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe
Nonetheless, believing himself invincible, thanks to connections at court, Gatwa’s Marlowe belongs ‘completely’ to a world that’s ‘dangerous, stinking and cruel’.
Which is why he winds up dead in a Deptford tavern.
Will, however, wants for nothing so sweet than to pass away peacefully, in his own bed.
It’s a relationship that could never have worked — except on stage. And Daniel Evans’s steamy production fizzes with rare theatrical chemistry.
Perhaps Joanna Scotcher’s set design, flanked by those three walls of floodlights, lacks intimacy.
But as Kit purrs: ‘History is written by the victors, and delegated to the poets.’
He might also have added that history can be reborn, as it is here, in these two actors — with fangs.
Born With Teeth is booking until November 1.
