“If Christopher Marlowe were alive today, he would’ve painted the town red. What a bad bitch!” howls Ncuti Gatwa…
“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….
“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….
On the heels of his departure from his history-making turn as the first Black actor to play Dr. Who last spring, he was immediately drawn to the idea of Adams’s conception of Kit. “I thought, I have to play this role. I was taken by this notion there was an iconic queer artist of the Elizabethan era whose work and legacy have been hidden a bit, and it’d be cool to engage with that. Not resurrect it, but give it a new life.”…