Review: MARLOWE’S FATE written by Peter B Hodges At White Bear, Kennington until 27 November 2021

‘So nearly superb. Very much well worth seeing. Just have an extra drink at the break, and slip back in about 20 minutes late.’ ★★★★

It’s a curious experience to go downstairs at the interval watching a five-star plus show and find oneself 20 minutes later wishing they just hadn’t started the second half.   Marlowe’s Fate is a curate’s egg of a play built around the idea that Christopher Marlowe (Nicholas Limm) didn’t get a knife in the eye in a tavern at Deptford in 1593 but vanished to Italy where he wrote all the plays later attributed to Shakespeare.

It’s a fun, if familiar, premise and beautifully set up in Peter B Hodges first three scenes of five: Set respectively in that Deptford Tavern where Ingram Frizer (PK Taylor, excellent in two roles) agrees to carry the can for Marlowe’s ‘death’; in a print shop where a dumbo named Shaxper (Lewis Allcock) wants a job and becomes a patsy, and at a masked ball where Marlowe’s Comedy of Errors is the evening’s entertainment and the genius slips away under cover of dark while his impostor is slid into place.



So far, so good, indeed so very good – funny, engaging, even gripping, and with plenty of witty allusions to Shakespearian comedy and life – the cross-dressing (Zoë Lambrakis, excellent in two roles), the mistaken identities, the way the man never managed to sign his name with the same spelling.

And it’s an entertaining idea that someone else must have written all those plays that snobbery believes is beyond the poetry and knowledge of an unschooled lout from provincial Stratford. Which is precisely where the second half hits the buffers. From straight comic dramatic sequence, we enter the land of literary debate, and in the hands of puppets at that.

Scene 4 leaps out of time to the 398^th annual Shakespearian Author’s Championship Challenge. Was it Elizabeth I, was it Walter Raleigh? Francis Bacon? Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford? No, of course it bloody wasn’t (de Vere would have had trouble with The Tempest, having been dead 5 years), and all this territory is explored at greater and more tedious length in Mark Rylance’s bonkers I Am Shakespeare and book upon book. It’s even neatly inverted in Upstart Crow.

The ‘fight’ between Marlowe and Shakespeare for the honours is staged as a puppet show, with the rest of the discarded contenders watching, and Stadler and Waldorf from the Muppets on commentary.

It’s a fun sketch idea for a couple of minutes, and certainly jolts the audience out of its expectations. There’s nothing wrong with conscious anachronism (or unconscious, come to that, given that Shakespeare – or was it Marlowe? - gives Julius Caesar a clock and Cleopatra her billiards). But the idea that ‘innovative’ is a wholly positive word hits its limits from time to time, and, unlike the rest of the witty and incisive dialogue, the scene rapidly becomes tiresome, repetitive and never-ending – if we were told one more time that Marlowe died in 1593, murder might have been done.

The puppets themselves (Penn O’Gara, also responsible for great costumes) are good. The committed gusto of their collective performance is to the company’s credit, but the scene kills the previous comic tension, and nothing in its life becomes it like the leaving of it.

Which is a shame as the fifth and final act tops things off nicely. Shakespeare, retired and prosperously drinking himself to death in 1616 fights off the efforts of Ben Jonson (Gary Dunnington) to commemorate him by publishing the plays he didn’t write, while Marlowe, alive and well and disguised in bearded barmaid drag, hopes his secret legacy can at last be revealed.

So nearly superb. Very much well worth seeing. Fast, funny, beautifully performed, a cut well above the usual standard. Brilliant set design (Reuben Speed), great costumes. Just have an extra drink at the break, and slip back in about 20 minutes late.

Photographer Benji Paris

MARLOWE’S FATE written and directed by Peter B Hodges

Presented by Caravan Theatre

White Bear, Kennington     

Dates: 3 November to 27 November 2021

Box Office: https://www.whitebeartheatre.co.uk/whatson/Marlowe's-Fate-

Reviewer: David Weir is a playwright. His plays include Confessional (Oran Mor, Glasgow), Better Together (Jack Studio, London), and Murdering the Truth (Greenwich Theatre, London). Those and others performed across Scotland, Wales and England, and in Australia, Canada, Switzerland and Belgium. Awards include Write Now Festival prize, Constance Cox award, SCDA best depiction of Scottish life, Joy Goun award, and twice Bruntwood longlisted.