Shakespeare and Marlowe sitting in a tree: Born With Teeth
A collaborative review of a play about collaboration.
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Two playwrights, both alike in dignity, in fair Cheapside where we lay our scene.
Really? Are you sure about that opening line?
What’s wrong with it?
I mean…it’s kind of obvious.
I see. And you can do better, can you?
I can give it a shot.
Have at it.
Ncuti Gatwa stalks the stage suggestively stroking his massive quill.
Not really sure it’s an improvement. Bit crude.
Because Shakespeare never dabbled in innuendo?
Fair point.
Liz Duffy Adams’ play, which premiered in 2022 in Austin, is a chamber piece in which Christopher Marlowe, the live-fast-die-young titan of the Elizabethan stage holes up with young Will Shakespeare, wannabe playwright, to bash out a play together. Scholars now agree, based on textual analysis, that Marlowe and Shakespeare co-authored Henry VI Parts I,II and III – which historically have always been attributed solely to Shakespeare – and Adams imagines what that collaboration might have looked like in a play spanning the years 1591 to 1593, which explores the long-posited idea that their union might have been more than a creative one.
Sort of like that episode of Frasier when Frasier and Niles try and write a book together? Only horny?
I mean, kind of. Ncuti Gatwa plays Kit as a walking hard-on in leather doublet and hose. Edward Bluemel plays Will with a more subdued and studious air, more focussed on trying to get the words out, while Kit struts and thrusts and purrs and occasionally tries to enlist his fellow scribbler as a spy.
We’re getting ahead of ourselves here. Let’s rewind. Daniel Evans’ production starts not with a whimper but with a bang.
It really does. The woman next to me nearly upended the liquid equivalent of a tenner on her expensive-looking shoes.
The stage is fronted by a massive black screen, and the bang is followed by a series of close-up shots of Gatwa’s tormented face – well his mouth actually, open in a howl - before the screen splits opens like the aperture of a camera to reveal of Marlowe and Shakespeare, shirtless - a recurring motif - and strung up by their ankles.
That’s one way of getting the audience’s attention.
It certainly is. Anyway, Bluemel’s Will quickly emerges to reassures that what we just saw didn’t actually happen. Not to them. But they were living in what was essentially an oppressive police state where a misstep could land you in a similar predicament.
Adams has said in interview that one of the influences for the play was the work of Belarus Free Theatre. She saw a performance of their show Burning Doors, which draws on their experiences of living under a brutal totalitarian regime, at LaMaMa in New York and was interested in the parallels between then and now. She points out that Thomas Kyd, Marlowe’s sometime roommate, was arrested and tortured, and probably dobbed Marlowe in. To be a Catholic at the time was dangerous. To be an atheist at the time was dangerous. To be gay was dangerous. And Adams’ version of Marlowe likes to flirt with danger.
Along with everything and everyone else.
