Phwoar! The chance to see a jacked and shirtless Ncuti Gatwa snogging his snake-hipped, chisel-cheekboned former Sex Education co-star Edward Bluemel is undoubtedly part of the appeal of Liz Duffy Adams’s seductively clever two-hander. The American writer imagines Christopher Marlowe (Gatwa’s ‘Kit’) collaborating with Shakespeare (Bluemel’s ‘Will’) on the three parts of Henry VI as religious and political tensions run high in Elizabethan England.
Her play blends intrigue and shifty eroticism with in-jokes and a discourse on creativity. The keynote of Daniel Evans’s production for the Royal Shakespeare Company, of which he is co- artistic director, is fluidity: nothing is every quite what it seems. That it’s been mounted in the West End with two hot TV faces – “there’s not enough money in theatre,” deadpans Gatwa’s Kit – adds an extra layer of knowingness: the Elizabethan stage relied on star casting.
