If this was a Hollywood movie, Liz Duffy Adams’ play might have been titled When Shakespeare Met Marlowe. A bromance between two of the greatest English playwrights ever to have put quill to parchment, it imagines their alleged collaboration over the trilogy of Henry VI history plays.
Not that academic ‘facts’ should get in the way of a good story and Adams tells a good story. From the moment young, callow Will takes the stage to give us a little background intro and the frontcloth explodes in images of screaming tortured men, it is clear that director Daniel Evans isn’t aiming for a night of subtle rumination.
As a snuffed candle flame triggers Neil Austin’s huge bank of blinding lights that dominate the scenes throughout, the two men Will (Edward Bluemel) and Kit (Ncuti Gatwa) are ignited in the fire of their own creativity. The only concession to the 16th Century Elizabethan age are the Mad Max costumes and vestigial props. The rest is far from silence.
Blazing with the energy of a feral genius, Gatwa’s Kit is a cousin to Caravaggio, a swaggering, bisexual smartass who would rather drink, fight and flirt than write. Will is left floundering in his rock star wake, like a talented acolyte hampered by social convention of having to make money and not rock the political boat.
The cloak and dagger shenanigans of Lord Cecil and his arch enemy Essex hover in the smoky background of Catholic paranoia as Kit (whose real income derives from espionage) attempts to seduce and recruit Will, claiming that poets have a pass to move freely between factions without being arrested and tortured. Up to a point.
Their collaboration is finely conveyed as the established Kit at first dismisses Will as an obedient lackey whose sophomore effort Titus Andronicus suggests he is a “hack writer of a derivative bloodfest”. Evans somehow maintains control over the mercurial Gatwa, whose athletic, sexually charged performance captures Marlowe’s renegade nature. Bluemel has the harder job, shifting from early vulnerability and burgeoning talent to a fully fledged Elizabethan literary star.
The language is fierce, funny and conjures the era without attempting to ape it. Strewn throughout with references to the plays of both Marlowe and Shakespeare as well as contemporaries such as Thomas Kyd and Beaumont & Fletcher, it is an informed playgoer’s wet dream.
But even for those who are less familiar with the work of either dramatist, it is a theatrical firestorm. Adams conveys with confidence the relationship between two equally gifted poet/dramatists but polarised personalities: the clever-but-reckless Kit and the clever-but-cautious Will, the ultimate Elizabethan Odd Couple.
If you want a more serious examination of Christopher Marlowe’s complex personality, see Peter Whelan’s The School of Night or read Anthony Burgess’s novel A Dead Man in Deptford. If you want ninety minutes of intoxicating theatre, see this.
BORN WITH TEETH IS AT WYNDHAM’S THEATRE UNTIL NOVEMBER 1