There’s no actual evidence that Shakespeare and Marlowe ever met. But in 2016, the New Oxford Shakespeare for the first time declared Marlowe as co-author on all three of the Henry VI plays. And suddenly the idea of the era’s two greatest dramatists sharing a room was a realistic prospect.
It's this breakthrough that has inspired Liz Duffy Adams’ play Born With Teeth, which depicts the two great playwrights composing Henry VI Parts One and Two. If Will and Kit wrote together, then they must have met. They must have argued. They must have discussed their contemporaries, their colleagues, the hopes and fears of their age. Given that both were most probably gay or bisexual, was there a spark of erotic attraction? How could there not have been? These men were poets, spies, entrepreneurs, visionaries. They spoke the language of love more seductively than anyone since Ovid. They must have fancied the britches off each other.
And so Adams has created what might best be described as a gay fanfic about Shakespeare and Marlowe.
While Born With Teeth certainly has the potential to be an intense, high-concept drama that spins an original tale of collaboration and rivalry out of an imagined partnership, it ends up being a big slice of Elizabethan yaoi. And while the rapier thrusts of wit and innuendo are fun, and the relentless Shakespearean Easter eggs, from ‘I am not treacherous’ to ‘We will all the pleasures prove’ (via ‘country matters’ of course) are superficially satisfying to spot, ultimately this is a play that starts in an interesting place, but doesn’t go anywhere from that point. Kit and Will spar, kiss, betray and compose, but it’s an exercise in writing one scene, not a narrative progression.
The play that most readily springs to mind when watching Born With Teeth is Tom Stoppard’s debut hit Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Both shows are wordy, philosophical musings between two characters whose very lives depend on the whims of more powerful men. But Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern has the structure of Hamlet to support it: a narrative crutch that gives it both sense and shape. By comparison, Born With Teeth is left blowing in the wind.
The show is blessed with a brace of brilliantly witty, three-dimensional performances from Ncuti Gatwa as Marlowe and Edward Bluemel as Shakespeare. Gatwa’s Marlowe is a preening popinjay fully aware of his overflowing charisma and irresistible sex appeal, while Bluemel’s Shakespeare is initially nervous, down-to-earth and polite, but discovers a gradually dawning self-confidence as the play, and his career, mature. Their steamy, lust-laden manipulations are the emotional engine-rooms of the show. Director Daniel Evans (fresh from portraying Marlowe’s Edward the Second himself in one of Stratford’s raunchiest Renaissance revivals of recent times) is a master when it comes to depicting that blurry line between sex and aggression, and he delivers it in bucketloads.
There are also some truly affecting moments that cut through the endless bickering. There’s a wonderful scene when the two men read out an entire, Shakespeare-penned, scene from Henry VI Part Two, and Marlowe can’t help being overawed by its passion and beauty. It was reminiscent of Danny Boyle and Richard Curtis’s Yesterday, when you see people respond to the Beatles’ music as if it’s never been heard before. And the final, short scene does at last move the plot along, with Marlowe stripped of his finery, heading for Death and Deptford, while Shakespeare proves that he has the Will to win in the end.
Joanna Scotcher’s set is spectacular: huge screens buzzing with digital glitches, and a back wall composed of a hundred lights shining straight out at the audience. But quite what the sci-fi scenario was trying to achieve, beyond a quick thrill, I am not sure. I was reminded of yet another Shakespeare contemporary, John Webster, who wrote, ‘Glories, like glow-worms, afar off shine bright, But looked to near have neither heat nor light’. In fact, what those rows of lights most resembled was the outside of a dalek, which, given that Marlowe was being played by the most recent Doctor Who, has a certain intertextual, if pointless, relevance.
And talking of Doctor Who, I do wish West End producers would bear in mind that casting current celebrities in plays has the unfortunate effect of skewing audience reactions. There was a big contingent of Whovians in Wyndham’s Theatre last night, and they laughed with raucous merriment and adoration almost every time Ncuti Gatwa spoke a line, before leaping to their feet as one at the end, as if their seats had concealed springs operated by the Deputy Stage Manager.
Adams’ creation is true to itself, and does what it sets out to do. But I couldn’t help feeling that this play is more an exercise in personal gratification than public entertainment. As an idea, it was born great. But so much more greatness could have been achieved.