Christopher “Kit” Marlowe was the pre-eminent playwright of Elizabethan England when he was murdered, possibly by agents of the crown, in 1593 at age 29. Scholars believe he wrote parts of Shakespeare’s “Henry VI” plays — he is listed as a co-author in a recent edition of the New Oxford Shakespeare — but little is known about the nature or extent of his acquaintance with the Bard.
In “Born With Teeth,” a new production by the Royal Shakespeare Company, the American playwright Liz Duffy Adams imagines the pair’s collaboration as a long-running, sexually charged mentor-mentee relationship. The term “creative license” doesn’t quite do it justice.
First performed in the Alley Theater in Houston in 2022, “Born With Teeth” premiered in London’s West End this week, directed by Daniel Evans and featuring Ncuti Gatwa, of “Doctor Who” fame, as Marlowe. The play, which runs at Wyndham’s Theater through Nov. 1, is not so much a historical drama as a jeu d’esprit in which the imagined flirtation is a springboard for a meditation on art and power.
It’s a moderately entertaining but ultimately somewhat sterile affair, let down by a patchy and simplistic script that feels unworthy of its subject matter.
Consistent with historical accounts, Gatwa’s Marlowe is an oversexed lech and brawler. His blustering, sexually aggressive repartee provides most of the laughs as he struts about the stage, suggestively brandishing a large, quivering quill. Edward Bluemel’s diffident, pragmatic Shakespeare is a rabbit in headlights — “I just want to write!” he pleads — though not entirely unreceptive.
Marlowe calls him “boy” — they’re the same age, but “not in stage years” — and spends most of the play trying to get him into bed. While staving off these advances, Shakespeare outlines his literary philosophy: Since life is fundamentally ungraspable, a playwright’s opinions should be inscrutable; he quietly blows Marlowe’s mind by writing villains sympathetically, in defiance of convention.
There’s an undercurrent of menace as Marlowe, who was believed to have worked as a spy for the crown, intermittently turns nasty when rebuffed. This was a time when the Elizabethan authorities were persecuting suspected Catholics and atheists, and even an unfounded denunciation could bring severe consequences. Some of Shakespeare’s family members are Catholic, so when Marlowe brags ambiguously about his access to “powerful friends,” Shakespeare is initially unsure if Marlowe is protecting or threatening him.
He hangs in there, and Marlowe is eventually murdered offstage in a plot arranged by the queen’s courtier, Sir Walter Raleigh. So it’s Shakespeare, not Marlowe, whose name is known the world over.
The story plays out against high rows of stud lights; the period costume is on point, and two brief scenes depict imagined interrogations on a giant video screen. (Lighting is by Neil Austin, costumes by Joanna Scotcher.) It’s visually arresting, but a play like this, featuring just two performers and centered almost entirely on dialogue, will stand or fall on the wit of the characters’ discourse — and, for the most part, Adams’s script isn’t up to it.
Almost from the off, the two men bicker like some long-in-the-tooth couple in a ’70s sitcom, with little variation in tempo or emotional ambience across the 90-minute run time. The register toggles awkwardly between bawdy knockabout and high-minded psychological drama. Gatwa, who recently excelled in the National Theater’s uber-campy take on “The Importance of Being Earnest,” is strong on the former but less convincing on the latter.
In fairness, Adams gives him most of the iffy lines: A jarringly anachronistic reference to the “state apparatus” sounds particularly ludicrous from the mouth of a man in 16th-century get-up.
There are a few pleasing in jokes, including a passing reference to “country matters” — the lewd innuendo that will be uttered by the title character in the as-yet-unwritten “Hamlet” but is spoken here, provocatively, by Marlowe instead of Shakespeare. When Shakespeare remarks, “No one is studying me” — he is not yet important enough to be scrutinized by the authorities — the double meaning draws a ripple of knowing laughter from theatergoers.
But the returns diminish fast.
If “Born With Teeth” speaks to our current moment — the dangers of making art in politically fraught times — it does so incredibly obliquely. What we have here, rather, is a variation on the fable of the tortoise and the hare, pitting an obnoxious A-type personality against a more quietly determined character. It’s a reductive and facile conflict, more redolent of fan fiction than of serious drama.
The play’s repetitiousness is inadvertently acknowledged by Bluemel’s Bard when, after being threatened by Marlowe for the umpteenth time, he retorts that nothing ever comes of his threats — “That’s just it. Over and over. And every time, the dagger’s more blunted.”
Born With Teeth
Through Nov. 1 at Wyndham’s Theater, London; www.wyndhamstheatre.co.uk.
The post A Tale of Shakespeare and Marlowe — and Sex and Power appeared first on New York Times.
