Theatre review: Born With Teeth

After a quiet start to his time as half the Artistic Director of the RSC Daniel Evans is having a busier second year, following up his role as a Christopher Marlowe lead by directing a play about the man himself. Liz Duffy Adams' Born With Teeth takes as its premise an academic theory that Marlowe might have contributed to Shakespeare's early Henry VI plays, as well as from the persistent rumours that he was murdered for his work as a spy. In a private back room in a pub we see the two playwrights - aware of each other but not yet acquainted - meet for the first time after being asked to complete an unfinished draft of the play that is now known as Part I. Kit Marlowe (Ncuti Gatwa) is the established, bad-boy superstar of Elizabethan theatre, and plays up to this image to the somewhat star-struck Will Shakespeare (Edward Bluemel,) dominating the conversation and making sure he reserves all the best scenes from the outline for himself.

Theatre review: The Pitchfork Disney

Max Harrison, the latest of the select group of directors who seem to specialise in Philip Ridley's twisted fantasies, now takes on the writer's first, and one of his most famous works for the stage: The Pitchfork Disney sets for tone for Ridley's worlds that live somewhere at the intersection of a very recognisable East London and a surreal apocalyptic wasteland. Presley Stray (Ned Costello) has just returned from a daily trip to the shops, to bring back supplies of chocolate for himself and his twin sister Haley (Elizabeth Connick,) seemingly the only time that either of them ever leaves the run-down flat where they grew up. Ten years previously when they were eighteen, their parents both died in mysterious, suspicious circumstances, and since then they've cocooned themselves, finding a twisted kind of comfort in telling each other tales of an apocalypse that only they survived.