A recent theory among Shakespeare scholars that the Bard (Edward Bluemel) and Christopher Marlowe (Ncuti Gatwa) may have collaborated on parts of Henry VI provides the premise for Liz Duffy Adams’s two-hander, Born with Teeth, now playing at Wyndham’s Theatre.
The play imagines the two ostensibly rival playwrights shut away in a room, charged with co-authoring a play while the political and religious tensions of Elizabethan England rage outside. Marlowe, already established — and possibly a spy himself — is steeped in the intrigues of the court and drawn to writing less as vocation than as a portal into adventure: social, sexual, and political. Shakespeare, by contrast, is the loyal family man and earnest craftsman, wedded to his art and his virtue, and constantly parrying Marlowe’s advances. Adams uses their confinement to pit these temperaments against each other, letting them spar, flirt, and explore what writing — and living — are for. History gives their exchanges a teasing irony: Marlowe boasts that his legacy will outshine Shakespeare’s.
Gatwa and Bluemel make a lively, well-balanced pair, and Daniel Evans’s direction allows them space to play out the shifting dynamics between their attraction and rivalry. Gatwa’s Marlowe is a swaggering showman, twirling his quill like a phallic rapier and tossing out barbs with relish. Bluemel’s Shakespeare is more cautious and self-effacing but gradually finds his own authority. Their repartee is quick and often funny — Shakespeare calls himself “ineffable”, to which Marlowe shoots back, “there’s nothing I can’t ‘F’”. Yet Adams’s humour can sometimes work against her: the clever wordplay and sexual innuendo pile up until they start to obscure the emotional or dramatic narrative.
The attraction between the men is played quite openly, and there’s a moment when Shakespeare briefly yields and kisses Marlowe — a charge that flickers, then fades. Like several other scenes, it feels more like a sketch of what might happen than a step forward in their story. Adams hints at a wider world of danger — Marlowe sketches a diagram of the court’s conspirators — but any sense of menace rarely seeps into the action. Only in the closing moments, when Will visits a fugitive Marlowe and ultimately betrays him, does the play edge toward the moral and emotional complexity it has been hinting at all along.
The writing room is spare: a tavern table and chairs, with large theatre spotlights framing the space. Between scenes, the scrim at the front pulses with techno beats and flashes of the two men’s silent screams — a jarring modern touch on an historical imagining. Adams’s conceit is a fine one, and her dialogue often witty, yet Born with Teeth remains a bright, articulate conversation rather than the fully realised drama it promises to be. What endures most is the charge between its two actors and the lingering sense of possibilities left unexplored — the perilous, intoxicating world just beyond that locked room.
Contemporary theatre often returns to imagined encounters between literary giants — Stoppard’s Arcadia, Shaffer’s Amadeus, or even The Invention of Love — as if to test genius against its own reflection. Born with Teeth joins that tradition with charm and intelligence, but it never quite finds the emotional or philosophical spark that would make its conceit truly burn.
Born With Teeth
By: Liz Duffy Adams
Directed by: Daniel Evans
Cast: Ncuti Gatwa, Edward Bluemel
Set and Costume Design: Joanna Scotcher
Until: 1 November 2025
Running time: 90 minutes, without interval
Photo Credit: Johan Persson