[title]
★★★
If you think a two-hander drama about Elizabethan legends Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare having a sexy, dangerous time while trying to write a play together sounds a bit slash fiction-y then you would have the number of Born with Teeth, a new drama by US playwright Liz Duffy Evans.
There is more to it than that, though. For much of its running time Daniel Evans’s RSC production comes across like an outlandish workplace comedy. It stars a Ncuti Gatwa so hysterically off the leash that it makes his Doctor look like William Hartnell’s: he makes a case for Marlowe as quite possibly history’s most annoying person. Hyper horny, hyper bawdy, and with the attention span of a gnat, the icing on the cake is that he sincerely believes himself to be the greatest playwright of the age (not an unreasonable assumption in 1591).
Born with Teeth is pretty trashy.
His unfortunate colleague is Edward Bluemel’s mild mannered William Shakespeare, who has been summoned by his (then) more famous peer to co-write the play Henry VI. He is keen to do this, but unfortunately Marlowe is too busy buzzing around like a cross between David Brent and Frank-N-Furter for anyone to get any work done. If Marlowe isn’t boasting about his own brilliance, he’s either trying to shag Shakespeare, fight Shakespeare, slag off Shakespeare’s work, or launch into a complicated spiel about the need for patronage to survive in the paranoid world of Elizabethan London.
There are laughs, but it’s not a comedy. There is a core of po-facedness that becomes more apparent as the play wears on. Shakespeare’s star waxes; Marlowe’s starts to wane, as his relentless outrageousness starts to annoy people in power.
Born with Teeth is pretty trashy. I rolled my eyes at the whole sexual tension thing: our two heroes do end up snogging, but it seems to be because that’s what happens in slash fiction - there’s little real sense of them being attracted to each other beyond Shakespeare liking Marlowe’s plays and Marlowe generally wanting to fuck everything that moves.
Evans directs with considerable force and zero period fluff: the scenes are divided by video interludes that look like Nine Inch Nails promo clips, and Joanna Scotcher’s set is mostly just a bank of dazzling lights.
All well and good but ultimately what Born with Teeth suffers the most from is asking us to imagine a sex-and-paranoia crazed Elizabethan society while not actually showing it to us. At one point Marlowe is literally lecturing Shakespeare with a diagram about how patronage works, but it might have been easier to picture if we ever saw the outside world. Fair enough, that’s not the play Duffy wrote. But I can’t help but feel she probably had a more expansive vision that she squashed down for the sake of crafting a cost-effective celebrity vehicle. The final act tries to pivot to tragedy, but it’s all based on off stage politicking that it’s hard to invest in.
None of this should detract from the fact that Born with Teeth is a lot of fun: two charismatic actors having a ball pinging off each other while chomping down on a script that spikes the trashiness with some genuine wit. It’s diverting – just don’t go expecting Shakespeare.
Wyndham’s Theatre, now until Nov 1. Buy tickets here.