There have been plays and films about Shakespeare, notably Tom Stoppard’s Shakespeare in Love. There have been plays and films about Christopher Marlowe, notably Peter Whelan’s The School of Night.
Liz Dufffy Adams in Born With Teeth is the first to bring the two playwrights together and put them both centre stage, imagining lively confrontations between them when they were co-writing the Henry VI trilogy.
In 1591 Marlowe, two years older than Shakespeare, was the pre-eminent playwright of the day, famed for Tamburlaine the Great. Shakespeare’s career had only just begun. Two years later Marlowe would die in a bar-room brawl. He was only 29 years old. No one knows why he was killed. There are many conjectures.
Adams’s dark. sharp and sexy 90-minute comedy is fiction. It premiered in America in 2022. The RSC’s production, directed by Daniel Evans, is the play’s British premiere.
The play is a political and psychological clash between two charismatic personalities who lived in a brutal, violent Tudor era, when it was dangerous to be Catholic and atheist.
Marlowe, who was also a spy, working for Queen Elizabeth’s Privy Council, attempts to seduce and recruit Shakespeare as a spy. Will Shakespeare succumb? The tension is high.
Born With Teeth is acted, directed, set and lit with flair. Ncuti Gatwa is a volatile, flirtatious Marlowe, flamboyantly agile and gay. Edward Bluemel‘s Shakespeare is a very boyish and likeable innocent. The chemistry between the two actors is excellent. The costumes they wear are both contemporary and historical, which give the production an engaging modern freshness.
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