William Shakespeare was fond of bawdy language so forgive my Elizabethan when I say that Ncuti Gatwa’s preening, prowling Christopher Marlowe basically wants to fight and “seek heaven in the flesh” for most of Liz Duffy Adams’ riotous reinvention of the relationship between that era’s two greatest playwrights.
Period leather has never looked sexier than when the Rwandan-Scottish actor stalks the quivering Shakespeare, brandishing his “throbbing quill.” He crawls sinuously across a huge table, leaps off it and even bicep curls it. I hope the set furnishings had their own intimacy coordinator.
While he declares he wants to throw himself into every earthly pleasure and “devour” it, Bleumel’s coltish, coy Shakespeare wants to dream and reinvent the world and our way of seeing it. Undeterred, Marlowe rips off his shirt, straddles Shakespeare, nips and nuzzles him in endless rounds that Adams suggest are as much about the rake’s notorious libido as his need to dominate.
Unfortunately, much as the 90 minutes with no interval entertains, with two electrifying performances and true moments of delight, it ultimately feels like endless foreplay.
Marlowe’s bad boy reputation has endured, but Adams also wants to highlight his illicit spying activities and somewhat clumsily introduce a well-hidden longing for love. The play impressively makes no concessions to newcomers to the era, bandying around names like Robert Cecil (Marlowe’s patron and implied lover) and the Earl of Southampton (likewise for Shakespeare) and assuming we know Shakespeare’s History Plays and their characters.
This piece is framed around three writing sessions of Henry VI, parts 1, 2 and 3, which many scholars argue was a collaboration between the two men. We start out with Marlowe the arrogant flashy meteor and a diffident, naive Shakespeare still a jobbing actor, then the dynamic shifts with the latter’s swift rise.
There’s fun in this early imbalance of power, but it feels a bit forced that Shakespeare is so extremely unworldly and such a goody goody, wanting to only use his own less impressive quill for it’s intended purposes when Marlowe and his fabulously oversized one offers endless other opportunities. Yes, the Bard was a grafter, but he was also, like every actor and artist in that period, a grifter. However, the two actors rise (ahem) to the challenge and make it (just about) work.
The simple period staging and costumes contrast powerfully with the three surrounding walls of globe (how on the nose) lights and the video screen that fills the front of the stage between each small time jump.
Adam’s writing is fluid, and she works in allusions to her subjects’ own wordsmithery (the title is a quote from Henry VI part 3) and achieves some of her own. But for such a short play with an entertaining premise and two charismatic leads, it sometimes drags, bogged down in the repetitive circling of themes and sexual advances. The rather rushed reaching for true poignancy and emotion at the end isn’t really earned and doesn’t quite convince.
The two stars have crackling chemistry but some of the intimate moments feel a little stagey, while Gatwa’s accent roamed from North of the border to somewhere vaguely Cornish. Much of this will bed in, of course, even if the two chaps never actually do. The show is great fun. Just not a much as it could have been. Perhaps, it simply bites off more than it can chew…
BORN WITH TEETH AT WYNDHAM’S THEATRE TO NOVEMBER 1