“If Christopher Marlowe were alive today, he would’ve painted the town red. What a bad bitch!” howls Ncuti Gatwa.
He’s speaking via phone from London, describing the Elizabethan playwright and scoundrel, known as much for plays like Doctor Faustus as for his libertine exploits. (He is believed to have been stabbed to death in a bar fight at just 29 years old while facing charges of “heresy.”)
Gatwa, the 32-year-old Rwandan-Scottish actor of Sex Education and Dr. Who fame, is currently donning Marlowe’s rakish leather doublet and cunning grin in the fiery West End two-hander Born With Teeth, opposite Edward Bluemel as William Shakespeare, Marlowe’s imagined rival, collaborator, and—in the very hypothetical world of the play—lusty sparring partner.
“The rivalry they feel towards one another and the admiration they feel and how that affects their artistry—it was a juicy subject matter to get into,” Gatwa says.
The play, written by Liz Duffy Adams and produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company, centers on a snappy series of (fictitious) meetings between Marlowe and Shakespeare as they collaborate on the latter’s Henry VI history plays from 1591 to 1593. Though there is no historical proof that they wrote together—or even that they were acquaintances—both were working at the same time in the treacherous political cauldron of Elizabethan London.
“England had gone from Catholic to Protestant to Catholic to Protestant rule, and during Catholic rule, Protestants are hunted; during Protestant rule, Catholics. Everyone is just terrified of each other, terrified to reveal themselves,” says Gatwa of the historical context of the piece. In the story, Christopher “Kit” Marlowe, a known spy for the Protestant deputies of Queen Elizabeth I, is paired up with Shakespeare, who is suspected of having papist leanings.
Add to that a bubbling layer of sexual tension between the two men, one that feels, to Gatwa, in keeping with the queerness alive in Marlowe’s texts.
“Me and Ed, we were very keen to just make it as hot as possible,” he says. Studying the work of Elizabethan historian Will Tosh in preparation, Gatwa “discovered how unapologetically queer Kit Marlowe was and indeed Shakespeare. I found out that the pair of them would write into their work same-sex pronouns. They wouldn’t hide their queerness.” He likens their tête-à-tête to that between a leopard (Marlowe) and a house cat (Shakespeare), and over the show’s brisk, 90-minute runtime, their taut repartee rarely slacks—a credit to director Daniel Evans.
