This article is taken from the October 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
The new two-hander play Born With Teeth, offering a fictionalised account of the relationship between Shakespeare and Marlowe, certainly opens with a bang. Daniel Evans’s production starts with Ncuti Gatwa’s Marlowe and Edward Bluemel’s Shakespeare suspended from ropes, prior to some kind of dreadful torture.
Marlowe shouts, “I’m a servant of Her Majesty!” just as a panicked Shakespeare yells, “I’m only a poet!” Intriguing names are dropped — Southampton, Lord Burghley, Tom Kyd — and for a moment, the play promises to be an electrifying Jacobean thriller, bringing something wildly and excitingly new to the well-worn sub-genre of Shakespeare the man. Then Bluemel’s suave Will strolls upstage and punctures the excitement by saying, “Yeah, that didn’t happen.”
It is this tension between historical fact and dramatic liberty that gives Liz Duffy Adams’s horny-handed fantasia its interest, although it is also hard not to feel that the audience is not watching a serious drama but high-class fan fiction.
The internet is awash with basement-dwellers with too much time on their hands who like to construct masturbatory fantasies about whether well-known historical figures (real or fictitious) had love affairs with one another — described in the most explicit and prurient of terms — and Born With Teeth feels like the PhD equivalent of such longed-for frottage.
When Marlowe is seducing Shakespeare with bold physicality rather than honeyed words, many in the audience were positively agog at the handsome — and often shirtless — young men embracing and, eventually, kissing one another.
Whether this has anything to do with the real-life relationship between the two playwrights is up for debate. The two men certainly knew one another (in the literary, rather than Biblical sense) and it is now half-accepted that Marlowe collaborated with Shakespeare on his Henry VI trilogy, which was written in 1591 and performed, largely to indifference, the following year.
Duffy’s drama takes as its starting point the idea that the swaggering, charismatic Marlowe has been half-reluctantly co-opted by Shakespeare’s patron Lord Strange to knock the young Stratfordian’s semi-formed dramatic ideas into some kind of focus.
The “opportunistic slut” Kit is not only licentiously queer, but the successful writer of the Elizabethan era’s most popular work, including Dr Faustus and Tamburlaine, which have established him as the rock star of his day: a connection wittily made by Joanna Scotcher’s costume design, where the linen shirts and leather trousers would look as fetching on a thrusting young musician as they do on these two scribes.
He attempts to seduce the initially baffled but far from displeased Will with a mixture of poetic fancy and physical vigour. At times in Gatwa’s lively, highly physical performance, I had the irreverent thought that this was what a young, handsome and black Uncle Monty might have looked like.
It would have come as little surprise, amidst the jokes about firm quills and well-stocked inkwells, if Kit had breathed, “Are you a sponge, or a stone?”
The play — which is notably, perhaps mercifully, short at 90 minutes without interval — is divided into three scenes, each of which develops the relationship between the two protagonists. In the first, and funniest, set in 1591, Shakespeare is the subservient partner, and Marlowe undeniably the top, bossing him around entertainingly.
In the second, set a year later, a degree of equivalence now exists between the two men both professionally and sexually, and Will can openly posit the unfulfilled idea of an “arrangement” between them, quoting Kit’s own lines “Come live with me, and be my love/And we will all the pleasures prove” at him.
The final scene takes place on 30 May 1593, as Marlowe, hopelessly compromised by his espionage connections, prepares for a fateful rendezvous in a Deptford tavern, which both he and Shakespeare know will end in his death.
To take any of this particularly seriously would be a mistake, and I am not at all sure that either Duffy or Evans means us to. It is a bold move to open a new play by a little-known playwright straight into the West End, and the star casting of Gatwa, the man of the moment, will ensure full houses.
He’s suitably smouldering and witty as Marlowe, although Bluemel has the more interesting role, as we see Shakespeare’s starry-eyed naivete about matters literary and sexual alike mature (curdle?) into something more cynical and complex.
There is a blessed absence of awkward anachronisms, with the sole cringe moment coming early on, when Kit describes himself having gone to “uni”, and the laughs — filthy, silly — are plentiful.
It’s an enjoyable night out, which tells you next to nothing about Elizabethan literature, and the more interesting subplot about spycraft feels neglected; a few more characters on stage might have helped.
But I suspect its target audience won’t care. “Hokum on stilts” my old English master would have called it, but this isn’t such a bad thing. If you’re in the mood for such things, sally on down to Wyndham’s and take your seat for an early pantomime, with only the barest of intellectual pretensions to cover its Bottom.
