BORN WITH TEETH Wyndhams, CX Road

POETIC PASSIONS IN A TUDOR POLICE STATE

    Here’s a lively aquib from the RSC, a bravura 85 minute two-hander about Christopher Marlowe –  dead at 29 in a Deptford tavern brawl – and young Will Shakespeare, thought to have collaborated with him on the least loved of the history plays, the Henry VI trilogy.   Set in one room – bare, with glaring lines of bulbs facing us – it storms along from 1591-3 in several meetings, burning with  homoerotic machismo which can , to be honest, get a bit tedious despite Ncuti Gatwa’s  ripped torso frequently displayed as Marlowe rips off his floppy blouson.   

    But it grows,  albeit a bit late, into a touching imaginative insight into why Shakespeare stands alone, miraculous  and eternally strange. The American Liz Duffy Adams was gripped by the precariousness of post-Reformation England under Elizabeth:  an effective police state after a decade of  religious persecutions both ways. Into this comes the idea that Marlowe, explosive roistering author of Tamburlaine and Dr Faustus, also operated as a political spy for Robert Cecil and Raleigh against the Earl of Essex.   And that he might, in a fierce collaborative friendship, have tried to enrol young Will, a more careful soul with a distant wife in Stratford and a child or two.   He might also, it’s suggested,  to some extent have used his pull with Cecil  protected Shakespeare  from the danger of having Catholic parentage.

    It’sa great idea, and the RSC’s Daniel Evans palpably relishes the idea of white-hot artistic partnership laced with fascination (from Edward Bluemel’s   country-boy Will) ) and predatory desire from Gatwa’s  Kit Marlowe. Adams neatly  lays out her own stall early,  as Kit chucks aside his collaborator’s copy of Holinshed’s Chronicles and his  “it’s a history play” with a dismissive “all the more reason to use our imagination”. 

        There are passages of working  debate – often funny as starry Kit brandishes and fondles his 3ft quill while Will scratches away with a lesser one.  Nice fragments of the plays emerge, Will always riveted by the villains.  It’s  interesting as they differ over Joan of Arc, la Pucelle:   Will sees her nobility as the stake approaches,   Kit snarls “she’s not a hero, she’s fucking French” and prefers her death as black comedy.  When Will tries to express his idea of God,   Kit responds “Ineffable? There’s nothing I can’t F–!”.  At one point they read together the  parting of Suffolk and Margaret of Anjou, ending in a hot embrace. Not their first.

       As I say, there are longueurs in the  personal interplay between Bluemel’s  rather sweet Shakespeare and  Gatwa’s  outrageous, camply macho, hip- swinging predatory leather-queen.  But by the 1593 scene it sobers:  savage monochrome flashes of agonizing interrogation fill the curtain  as they did before  the start.   Life is very dangerous.   Kit has gone  too far in his edgy espionage,   and  Will has risen to prosperity but will never feel quite safe. There are edges  of mutual treachery,  and a properly moving, ambiguous final separation and farewell which haul in the third mouse.

rating 3