ajhlovestheatre

TEETH ‘N’ SMILES

by David Hare

songs by Nick Bicât (music) and Tony Bicât (lyrics)

additional music and lyrics by Rebecca Lucy Taylor

directed by Daniel Raggett

Duke of York’s Theatre, London – until 6 June 2026

running time: 2 hours 20 minutes including interval 

https://www.thedukeofyorks.com/teeth-n-smiles

“There’s something inside me that won’t lie down” howls Maggie Frisby, the on-the-ropes would-be rock goddess whose spectacularly dissolute downfall is the crux of David Hare’s mid-1970s play. As played by Rebecca Lucy Taylor (aka acclaimed singer-songwriter Self Esteem) in this appropriately grungy, full-throttle revival by Daniel Raggett, it’s impossible not to take her at her word. This woman has been wrecking herself with booze (she’s first seen being carried in a stupor from the auditorium to the stage) for years and is as unreliable as she’s talented, but is never out-for-the-count for long. 

Taylor is a marvel: a one-woman whirlwind of raucous energy, deft comic timing, bereft desolation and wild lunacy, with a steel-lunged belt that pierces the soul before subsiding into something like a whisper. She’s danger and earthy charisma personified, and does much to elevate Teeth ‘n’ Smiles, a dated but interesting piece that in lesser hands than the ones involved here, could easily devolve into being a boozy, drug-fuelled dirge studded with the kind of rock music that foreshadowed punk before being effectively killed off by it.

Bearing a superficial resemblance to last year’s smash hit Stereophonic, also seen at the Duke of York’s, Hare’s play unfolds over one tumultuous night as a troubled rock band, led by Maggie, implodes spectacularly while playing the Cambridge University Summer Ball. The meandering script is shot through with sour, ironic wit, and boasts a fascinating gallery of men behaving badly (the sole other female character than Maggie is woefully underwritten). The state-of-the-nation talk feels like a precursor to much of Hare’s politically charged work later in his career.

The year is 1969, and Raggett’s staging and Hare’s writing capture the gleeful nihilism of a period still crawling out of the long shadows cast by the Second World War: when asked about the volume of their gigs, a band member responds “the louder we play the sooner we won’t be able to hear”, and their morally ambiguous manager (brilliantly played by Phil Daniels) has a vivid, gruesome speech recalling his presence at the WW2 bomb strike on Piccadilly’s Café de Paris.

Perhaps to reflect the fact that most of these characters are out of their minds for much of the play, twenty-something Hare gave them dialogue that sounds less like conversation and more like a series of (frequently outrageous) non sequiturs. It feels authentic, and certainly reflects the antediluvian attitudes of the time period the play’s set in, but it doesn’t elicit much interest in, or sympathy for, the individuals involved.

The cast of actor-musicians is terrific though. Michael Abubakar, Samuel Jordan, Jojo Macari and Noah Weatherby make a wonderfully Rabelaisian crew, and there’s strong, sensitive work from Michael Fox as Arthur, the songwriter with a complicated connection to Maggie. Roman Asde is funny and a little sad as a bedazzled student in way over his head, and Aysha Kala finds more substance to the role of Laura, the group’s general dogsbody and Arthur’s alternative romantic interest, than one suspects there is in the actual writing.

Raggett’s production has an appropriately makeshift feel but is actually laser- sharp in focus, and technically superb. The murky darkness of Chloe Lamford’s set is pierced by shards of unforgiving lighting (Matt Daw), and for all the chaos of the offstage sections it’s usually clear where the eye should be drawn to. Ben and Max Ringham’s sound design has an authentic rock’n’roll feel, and Alex Mullins’ costumes are period perfect, especially flamboyant for Taylor. A pivotal, genuinely moving scene between lovelorn Arthur and defeated Maggie plays out within a sheet of dry ice to evoke smoke, illuminated only from behind, by the citrus left-over glow of an arsonist’s fire; it’s all the more effective and compulsive because we can’t see Fox and Taylor’s faces, and we are entirely drawn in.

For all the expertise in Raggett’s staging, the talent of the company, the authenticity of Nick and Tony Bicât’s songs, and the unflinching fire of Taylor’s performance, Teeth ‘n’ Smiles leaves us with a nagging question. Why revive this play now, aside from the fact that this is its fiftieth anniversary? It’s a trawl through the sexist, seamy underbelly of the music industry but there’s nothing inherently revelatory here. As a play, it’s dramatically inert, albeit intermittently engaging….but as a star vehicle for the astonishing Rebecca Lucy Taylor, it’s undoubtedly a success.