"For much of its running time Daniel Evans's RSC production comes across like a particularly insane workplace comedy. Starring a Ncuti Gatwa so off the leash that it makes his Doctor look like William Hartnell, 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)."
"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 . 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"
Born with Teeth stages a two-hander pairing Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare as they attempt to co-write a play amid sex, rivalry and surviving Elizabethan patronage. Daniel Evans's RSC production leans toward an insane workplace comedy, with Ncuti Gatwa delivering an unrestrained, hyper-horny Marlowe who boasts of being the greatest playwright and distracts everyone. Edward Bluemel's mild-mannered Shakespeare is eager but repeatedly derailed by Marlowe's antics, which include advances, fights and attacks on Shakespeare's work. Laughter mixes with growing seriousness as Shakespeare's career ascends and Marlowe's notoriety and danger to himself increases under powerful scrutiny.
Read at Time Out London
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