Born with Teeth\u00a0is pretty trashy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
His unfortunate colleague is Edward Bluemel\u2019s mild mannered William Shakespeare, who has been summoned by his (then) more famous peer to co-write the play Henry VI. 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\u2019t boasting about his own brilliance, he\u2019s either trying to shag Shakespeare, fight Shakespeare, slag off Shakespeare\u2019s work, or launch into a complicated spiel about the need for patronage to survive in the paranoid world of Elizabethan London.\u00a0<\/p>\n
![\"Born\u202fWith\u202fTeeth,](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/1756862892_785_image.webp.webp\")
\nPhoto: Johan PerssonNcuti Gatwa
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There are laughs, but it\u2019s not in fact a comedy: there is a core of po-facedness that becomes more apparent as the play wears on. Shakespeare\u2019s star waxes; Marlowe\u2019s starts to wane, as his relentless outrageousness starts to annoy people in power.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Born with Teeth is pretty trashy. I rolled my eyes at the whole sexual tension thing: our two heroes do end up snogging, but it mostly seems to be because that\u2019s what happens in slash fiction – there\u2019s little real sense of them being attracted to each other beyond Shakespeare liking Marlowe\u2019s plays and Marlowe just generally wants to fuck everything that moves.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Evans directs with considerable force\u00a0 and zero period fluff: the scenes are divided by video interludes that look like Nine Inch Nails promo clips, and Joanna Scotcher\u2019s set is\u00a0essentially just a bank of dazzling lights.\u00a0<\/p>\n
All well and good but ultimately what Born with Teeth suffers from the most is asking us to imagine a sex and paranoia crazed Elizabethan society while not actually showing it to us. At one point Marlowe is literally lecturing Shakespeare with a diagram about how patronage works, but it might have been easier to picture if we ever saw the outside world. Fair enough, that\u2019s not the play Duffy wrote. But I can\u2019t help but feel she probably had a more expansive vision that she squashed down for the sake of crafting a cost effective celebrity vehicle. The final act tries to pivot to tragedy, but it\u2019s all based on off stage politicking that it\u2019s hard to invest in.\u00a0<\/p>\n
None of this should detract from the fact that Born with Teeth is a lot of fun: two charismatic actors having a ball pinging off each other while chomping down on a script that spikes the trashiness with some genuine wit. It\u2019s diverting \u2013 just don\u2019t go expecting Shakespeare.<\/p>\n
Wyndham\u2019s Theatre, now until Nov 1. Buy tickets here<\/a>.<\/p>\n The best new London theatre shows to book for in 2025.<\/a><\/p>\n