Born With Teeth review – Ncuti Gatwa peacocks and flirts his way through this radical play

Liz Duffy Adams’ Tudor fan fiction stars Gatwa and Edward Bluemel as rivals Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare – it’s just a shame it didn’t dig deeper

Bluemel and Gatwa as rivals-slash-lovers in ‘Born With Teeth’ (Johan Persson)

“Poets get around,” boasts Elizabethan literary titan Christopher Marlowe in this sharp, saucy period drama by US playwright Liz Duffy Adams. And with Ncuti Gatwa in the role, you can well believe it. The Doctor Who star seems to sweat both charisma and sex in his tight black leather doublet, showing off his “throbbing quill”, and boasting of his ability to flit from dark taverns to London’s most exclusive eyries of power. This peacocking is designed to intimidate his shyer rival, a yet-to-be-famous Shakespeare (a diffident Edward Bluemel). But rivalry is next to love. And there’s more than a hint of romantic tension to this exercise in Tudor fan fiction.

Adams neatly sketches the setting here: a much murkier one than the noble Elizabethan fantasias that the queen’s favoured poets created. In grimy London, an aged Elizabeth I presides over a paranoid surveillance state, administered by her warring favourites, and employing opportunists like Marlowe to do her dirty work. Daniel Evans’ overly brash production, at Wyndham’s Theatre, plunges us straight into this terrifying world with grainy, Clockwork Orange-style projected torture scenes, discordant thuds of music and a stage studded with dazzling, flashing lights (combined with Jamie Lloyd’s similarly blinding Evita a few streets away, it must be putting considerable pressure on Covent Garden’s electricity supply).

Shakespeare thinks he and Marlowe (the rebellious, atheist author of Doctor Faustus) are meeting up for an innocent writing session. Marlowe has other ideas. He flirts shamelessly, then tries to draw his rival into his spy-ridden world. Here, Gatwa revels in his role to an almost distracting degree: brandishing an implausibly long feathered quill, making an Olympics-worthy leap across the stage, and baring his gleaming chest. It’s all incredibly enjoyable. But what he doesn’t do is bare his soul, or show the inner torment of a man so obsessed with power and political intrigue that he’ll sacrifice everything else, even his happiness. Adams’ play piles on borrowed Shakespeare quotes without quite finding a psychological language of its own. It’s oddly paced, too, with the sexual tension peaking too soon, then subsiding into camp.

Still, there’s the germ of something really interesting here. Marlowe was only officially acknowledged as Shakespeare’s co-author on Henry VI in 2016, after centuries of speculation. Adams imagines what their literary collaboration might have looked like, creating a welcome corrective to the established narrative of his lone genius. And more radically, she suggests that the pair’s love might have seeped into the play, reconfigured into the forbidden romance between King Henry’s wife and his manipulative adviser, the Duke of Suffolk.

Born With Teeth is built on abundant research into both Shakespeare and his fascinating rival Marlowe, but it never feels dry. It sings with all the sex and politics and religious iconoclasm that the bard handled so carefully in his plays, showing that every literary choice he made was freighted with danger. What it doesn’t do is show the emotional cost of living in this world. And that makes it hard to get deeply invested in this impossible literary love story, however intriguing its twists and turns might be.