From Alehouse Shadows to Immortal Words: Born With Teeth Electrifies the Stage ⭐⭐⭐⭐

In a dimly lit London tavern, two giants of the English literary canon collide with fiery intensity, igniting a theatrical experience as seductive as it is cerebral. Born With Teeth, now running at Wyndham’s Theatre, reimagines the charged meeting of minds between Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare—not as a quaint historical encounter, but as a volatile, visceral confrontation between brilliance and ambition, danger and desire.

Liz Duffy Adams conjures a world where past and present collapse into one another. Her play doesn’t just revisit history—it resuscitates it with a pulse that beats wildly beneath leathered doublets and ink-stained manuscripts. With Marlowe and Shakespeare shut away in the belly of a tavern, ostensibly to co-author Henry VI, what unfolds is less collaboration and more combustion. Their creative partnership simmers with tension, an interplay of egos, intellects, and irresistible attraction. It's not about what they produce—it’s about what they provoke in each other.

The genius of the piece lies not in fact but in its freedom. History leaves gaps, and Adams exploits them to delicious effect. What was the true nature of Marlowe and Shakespeare’s relationship? The play flirts with every possibility: rivalry, kinship, seduction, betrayal. Their duels—verbal, ideological, sometimes physical—are threaded with wit and danger, made all the more electric by a script that glides between contemporary irreverence and Elizabethan gravity. One moment, it’s literary critique; the next, it's intimate warfare.

This is not the polite, powdered Elizabethan theatre of textbooks. Here, the stakes are bloody and immediate. Marlowe, as portrayed with swaggering magnetism by Ncuti Gatwa, burns at both ends—decadent, defiant, and unashamedly himself. His Marlowe dances dangerously close to flames: an atheist, a spy, a lover of men, a provocateur who relishes his own myth. Opposite him, Edward Bluemel’s Shakespeare is an early draft of the Bard we know—reserved, careful, still finding the shape of his voice, but no less potent. As the play unfolds, he matures before our eyes, channelling emotion into form, turning private fear into public art.

The contrast between them is more than stylistic; it’s philosophical. Marlowe seeks to dazzle, to dominate, to disturb. Shakespeare listens, absorbs, and transforms. Their dialogue about history, truth, and character becomes a kind of alchemy—one prioritises the spectacle, the other, the soul. And yet both are navigating a world where expression can be deadly. Under the shadow of an authoritarian regime, words are weapons, and theatre is either camouflage or confession.

Director Daniel Evans brings a cinematic flair to the production, infusing it with restless energy. The set and costume design—modern in spirit though rooted in period style—suggest a world where boundaries are always shifting. Occasionally, the visual interludes depicting state violence feel a touch heavy-handed, but the overall effect is a world thick with peril. Here, even art has consequences.

At its heart, Born With Teeth is a celebration of artistic courage. It imagines the messy, human origins of genius—not as divine inspiration descending from on high, but as something wrestled into being in cramped rooms and under surveillance, in hunger and in lust. It’s a tribute to queer history, to the stories that hide between the lines, and to the idea that even the most revered figures in culture were once young men with something to prove.

This play doesn't just tell us where greatness might come from—it shows us. From the ale-soaked backrooms of London to the hallowed halls of literary immortality, Born With Teeth reminds us that every masterpiece has a beginning—and sometimes, that beginning is a bruising, breathless, beautiful mess.

At Wyndham’s Theatre until 1 November, this is not one to miss. Photography: Johan Persson