Born With Teeth: ‘mischievously provocative’ play starring Ncuti Gatwa

“It’s theatre, not a history lesson,” says Will Shakespeare early on in Liz Duffy Adams’s “firecracker” of a new play. This line, said Sarah Hemming in the Financial Times, serves as a warning to the audience that they should “take everything” here “with a pinch of salt”.

Steamy, “mischievously provocative”, and “peppered with literary gags”, “Born With Teeth” imagines the relationship between Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe as they collaborate on the “Henry VI” plays. It’s highly entertaining, and sensationally acted: Edward Bluemel makes a convincingly gauche but steely Will, the young man from the sticks, while Ncuti Gatwa (“Doctor Who”) is superb as Kit – a “hypnotic presence twirling a ridiculously camp quill”. But what holds the play back is its failure “to dive deeper into the huge themes” it raises, which include religious and artistic freedom in a repressive era.

Gatwa’s fans will surely relish this “sprightly” production, said Clive Davis in The Times – although his Marlowe, all extravagant gestures and wicked glances, is very like “the OTT version of Algernon that he gave us in the National’s recent, panto-like revival of ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’”. Others may be more sceptical about what is essentially “an ingenious revue sketch stretched to outsize proportions”. But while the script is rich in literary references, when compared with, say, the TV comedy “Upstart Crow”, there is “more artful wittering here than actual wit”, said Dominic Cavendish in The Daily Telegraph.

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We get some sense of the complex times in which these men live. Adams suggests that Marlowe’s insouciance and his insecurity relate to his “espionage-related connections in high places”; and both men are under pressure to “spill inculpating secrets about each other” – Marlowe’s inferred atheism and the Catholic leanings of Shakespeare’s parents.

All this should “matter”, yet we’re left with a feeling of “So what?”. The evening is “really not terrible”, said Dominic Maxwell in The Sunday Times; but I could not see the point of it. “Bluemel is great. Gatwa has his moments. Some lines land. What can I say? I’d rather have done my taxes.”

Wyndham’s Theatre, London WC2. Until 1 November