‘I think of it as a very sexy, dangerous game of Elizabethan cat and mouse.” Ncuti Gatwa is describing his new project with the Royal Shakespeare Company, a two-hander about William Shakespeare and fellow playwright Christopher “Kit” Marlowe. In Born With Teeth, Will and Kit collaborate on a play about Henry VI – for “collaborate”, read flirt, fight and ruminate betrayal.
Gatwa plays Marlowe and Shakespeare is Edward Bluemel; the pair last worked together on TV’s Sex Education. Bluemel followed that series about horny teens with playing a vampire (A Discovery of Witches), an MI6 agent (Killing Eve) and a brooding lord (My Lady Jane), while Gatwa was cast as one of the Kens in the Barbie movie and starred in a little thing called Doctor Who.
Sitting on a sofa just before rehearsals begin, they make amiable, nicely contrasted figures. Gatwa with cropped hair and tight white T-shirt, his bangle and ring shining gold. Tousle-haired Bluemel in black, silver rings in ear and on finger. He’s eager and chatty; Gatwa seems more guarded, until his laugh explodes seemingly out of nowhere.
A note from playwright Liz Duffy Adams in the Born With Teeth script says that the actors’ ages or looks don’t matter, “as long as they are wildly charismatic”. I have to ask: do they feel well cast? They guffaw, and Bluemel leans forward. “I’m here to break it to everyone that you, Ncuti, are wildly charismatic.”
So who are these characters? “It’s fascinating to dig into these men who were more than likely queer in different ways,” says Bluemel. “Marlowe wears his heart on his sleeve – plays like Edward II are brazen and brave depictions of queer love. Shakespeare is scared – he wants to talk about things, but via ancient Rome or picturesque Ephesus.” In the play, Will avers, “I want to hide in my work, like an outlaw in the forest.” Kit derides his colleague as “careful Will, who won’t”.
Marlowe, Gatwa declares, “dances with danger”. The play leans into his supposed career as an agent of Elizabethan spymasters, and the peril that brings for everyone in his orbit. Mistrust lends the dialogue an erotic shimmer – and neither knows who is being played. “How sincere is a snog?” grins Bluemel. “A question I ask myself after every snog …”
Drama thrives in history’s gaps. Adams has Kit scorn research for their Henry VI play: “Sources? Are we to take direction from historians?” Gatwa doesn’t share that sentiment himself, but mentions a note from Daniel Evans, their director: “All that research is not going to teach you how to act the characters.” Even so, they enjoyed a research week, “getting under the skin of that world, which doesn’t feel too different from the world we’re in now.”
It’s certainly a rollicking read. “It starts fast, and they’re deep into each other’s lives, unpicking each other,” Gatwa says. “When we first read the play there was a lift-off, it’s so human – their attraction to each other, their jealousy and insecurities.”
Adams drops “some real deep cuts, lots of Easter eggs” for the drama nerds, says Bluemel. “There’s some beautiful passages. If you set yourself the challenge of writing dialogue for Marlowe and Shakespeare, you’ve got to write pretty gorgeous stuff, which Liz has. The play is rooted in history, but so much is exciting, fun conjecture – where we as actors can really enjoy ourselves.”
Enjoying themselves on stage is what these actors signed up for – they’d both originally imagined theatre careers (“then TV got its greasy mitts on you,” teases Bluemel). Shuddering, Gatwa summons his training for screen acting. “Do you remember the first time you saw yourself on camera? Horrible.” Bluemel, who dreamed of “performing Shakespeare in a National Trust garden”, still feels “much more comfortable on stage – maybe because I can’t watch myself”.
He hasn’t performed in Shakespeare since a student attempt in Cardiff as Leontes in The Winter’s Tale, though “I always have my ears pricked up to do some Shakespeare”. Gatwa followed Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet in Manchester with Emma Rice’s riotous A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Shakespeare’s Globe. A more recent retooled classic was the National Theatre’s audacious The Importance of Being Earnest. “It was chaos every single night,” he beams. “Delicious, delicious chaos.” Rather like Born With Teeth, he says, the show brandished a queer subtext that was hiding in plain sight. “In academic conversations, there’s a tendency to play that stuff down. It was nice to bring it out to the forefront.”
Kit and Will were provincial lads who flourished in London. How about the actors playing them? Gatwa would travel up for auditions on the overnight bus from Glasgow (“Thirty quid!”). He waxes nostalgic: “Megabus Gold, I loved it. You sleep all night, get into Victoria Station, brush your teeth and head off to your audition.” He tried out for a role in Shakespeare in Love in the West End just after being attacked by three strangers on his way home from a nightclub. “I had just gotten jumped, and had big problems with my mouth,” he says, recalling the swelling that went on to explode during his meeting. “I was in the audition for flipping Sonia Friedman [the leading impresario] and it popped. I left in the worst mood, but got the job.”
In Gatwa’s words, “the best actors are all working at McDonald’s”. The line between making it and not can feel arbitrary. “A lot of right place, right time, and parts that lend themselves to you as an actor,” Bluemel confirms. “I always think: if I was the casting director, would I cast me in this? Sometimes the stars align.”
The Time Lord in the room is, of course, Doctor Who, the role that Gatwa has just relinquished after two not-uncontroversial seasons. Few roles are such magnets for unfiltered opinion – has he managed to tune out the chatter? “I’m quite good at shutting the noise out,” he says. “It’s loud. But it’s very cool and exciting to be in the middle of this huge thing – there’s haters, there’s lovers, it’s all going on. It is an absolute gift of a job, and a gift of a community. The Whovians are so deeply in my heart, I can’t tell you.”
Quite apart from the challenge of making the character your own, is there any coaching for the attention around the series? “Yes, there was, but I don’t think it can ever prepare you for what it feels like. They put security outside my mum’s house, my brother’s house, and I would say: what could possibly be the need? And then the need comes.” Only someone who has stood at the eye of this storm can understand it. “I was just at Glastonbury and bumped into Matt Smith in a club,” he adds, “and we had great, deep chats about that job and how there’ll never be another like it in our lifetimes. We’ll never work that hard again. Never be as stimulated and stretched. It’s also very exhausting, so it’s lovely to delve into other projects.”
Bluemel’s roles too attract a fair degree of attention. So is there an ideal level of fame: offering opportunities but protecting you from intrusion? “My ideal is to work on good stuff and make a living from it,” says Bluemel. “Some of those big jobs, from a professional point of view, might be amazing, but at what cost? It changes people’s lives irrevocably.”
As a student, Gatwa was a go-go dancer at one of Glasgow’s “pivotal gay clubs. They had these shower cubicles that were open to the club. I would dance in the showers in a pair of hot pants and next morning wake up and work on sonnets.” Is dancing good for confidence? “You need a lot of front – or a lot of shots! Yes, it was good for confidence, chatting to different people every night. Go-go dancing sets you up for life!”
Born With Teeth may not require hot pants, but it has required both actors to let go of some inhibitions. Movement director Ira Mandela Siobhan prescribed some initial trust exercises. “When someone’s falling into your arms, lifting you up, throwing you around, a trust builds,” Gatwa says. “There’s all sorts of push and pull,” adds Bluemel – the performance will involve “a high adrenaline vulnerability”.
Gatwa needs the bathroom, so we wrap up, giving Bluemel the last word on Born With Teeth. “It feels modern and current,” he says. “A clash of ambitions, jealousy, romance – ultimately, two very complicated people who can’t decide what they think of each other. I hope it feels like a horny Elizabethan whirlwind.”