Born With Teeth review – Ncuti Gatwa simmers in Elizabethan battle of the playwrights

Wyndham’s theatre, London
Gatwa’s Christopher Marlowe and Edward Bluemel’s William Shakespeare flirt, fight and write in Liz Duffy Adams’ sizzling new chamber play

Forget William Shakespeare. This is Christopher Marlowe’s moment. Starring Edward Bluemel (My Lady Jane, Killing Eve) as hardworking, wary Will and Ncuti Gatwa (The Importance of Being Earnest, Doctor Who) as randy, troublesome Kit, Liz Duffy Adams’ new chamber play squirrels the literary titans away in a room in 1591 to 1593, playing out an energetic, erotic version of some historians’ suspicions that the playwrights’ lives – and Kit’s violent death – were more intertwined than we think.

“It is a history play,” Will chides, as Kit bends the truth in the script of Henry VI Part I, which the two great poets are writing together. “All the more reason to use our imaginations,” Kit retorts with an exaggerated flourish of his quill. Enjoying the historical license her character grants her, Duffy Adams whips the competitors into a frenzy and releases them at each other’s throats, letting them flirt, threaten, fight - and very occasionally write.

At Wyndham’s theatre, London, until 1 November