Teeth ’n’ Smiles at Duke of York’s Theatre
Neil Dowden in the West End
★★★☆☆
29 March 2026
David Hare’s early play Teeth ’n’ Smiles returns to the West End 50 years after it first rocked up there. A play with songs rather than a musical, it depicts a chaotic gig by a fictitious rock’n’roll band on its last legs at the fag-end of the 1960s. Rebecca Lucy Taylor (who as a musician herself goes under the name of Self Esteem) is well cast as Maggie Frisby, the inflammatory frontwoman of The Skins, who are playing three sets throughout the night for the students of Jesus College, Cambridge at their May Ball of 1969. Amidst a maelstrom of sex, drugs, and booze, it’s a disaster waiting to happen.
Rebecca Lucy Taylor as Maggie.
Photo credit: Helen Murray.
All is not well with the members of the band at the outset, but things get a whole lot worse. The limited commercial success they once had has ebbed away, and their rebellious zeal has been tamed, so that they are now reduced to accepting £120 to perform in front of a bunch of toffs who have no interest as they celebrate the end of the academic year.
The drummer and keyboardist compete with each other to share the most boring trivia, the lead guitarist is most interested in getting off with groupies, and the bassist is off his head on heroin. Meanwhile the singer, who has recently broken up with the songwriter who is now dating her old school friend the band’s publicist, has to be revived from a whiskey-induced stupor before having a meltdown on stage and going out in a blaze of infamy, as the police carry out a drugs bust. With perfect timing their distant manager turns up to witness the mayhem and pull the plug.
There is not a lot of smiling in this play while its teeth are sharp. Hare is not just writing about the implosion of a band but also the end of an era – of the countercultural belief in positive social change through music – as the optimism of the sixties gives way to the cynicism of the seventies. The somewhat gnomic line “The ship is sinking but the music remains the same” points towards a broader canvas of long-term national decline. Yes, it’s a state of the nation play – surely Hare’s favourite genre – in the guise of a rock drama. But while it expresses a powerful mood of disillusionment, strangely for a writer who made his name as a left-wing playwright it gives very little sense of what ideals have been lost.
Jesus College is Hare’s alma mater and Teeth ’n’ Smiles was apparently inspired by a disastrous gig by Manfred Mann when he was there. It’s one of a number of recent rock-themed shows in London, including Hampstead Theatre’s revival of Tom Stoppard’s much more political Rock’n’ Roll (featuring Syd Barrett), the return of Joe Penhall’s jukebox musical Sunny Afternoon about the Kinks’ formative years, and last year the UK premiere of David Adjmi’s Tony Award-winning Stereophonic (also at Duke of York’s Theatre) about the tensions within a Fleetwood Mac-style band in the studio. And opening next month at Kiln is Tom Wright’s Please Please Me that focuses on the Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein.
Aysha Kala as Laura.
Photo credit: Helen Murray.
Director Daniel Raggett brings to this show some of the free-wheeling energy seen in his production of Accidental Death of an Anarchist. Chloe Lamford’s set presents a stage for the band to perform on plus a green room, while Alex Mullins’s costumes suggest the period’s colourful flamboyance. Matt Daw’s lighting effects and Ben and Max Ringham’s amplified sound bring a live concert feel. The original songs by brothers Tony (lyrics) and Nick Bicât (music) may sound more seventies than sixties – even proto-punk – but they stand up well, with Taylor adding to one of the songs and writing a new one herself, the moving “Maggie’s Song”. They are performed with raw power by the cast.
In the original production Maggie was played by Helen Mirren who modelled her performance on the super-talented but self-destructive Janis Joplin. Here, Taylor has said she is channelling some of her own personal challenges as a woman working in the music business as well as her frustrations with years of struggle when part of folk-pop duo Slow Club before her breakthrough solo success. This is her first “straight” stage role after playing Sally Bowles in Cabaret at Playhouse Theatre’s Kit Kat Club in the West End (though she also wrote the music for Suzie Miller’s international hit monodrama Prima Facie starring Jodie Comer). In a charismatic performance, she certainly looks and sounds the part of the angry northern frontwoman who refuses to go quietly into obscurity – “The acid dream is over – lezzava good time” – though it’s a little one-note to convey her complex inner life.
Michael Fox plays the radical but disenchanted songwriter – a rare working-class music student at Cambridge before dropping out – who is caught between Maggie and Aysha Kala’s coolly pragmatic publicist. Samuel Jordan plays the hedonistic lead guitarist and Jojo Macari the hallucinating bassist. Roman Asde is a naïve and needy medical student journalist, while Christopher Patrick Nolan is an out-of-his-depth college porter who tries to satisfy the band’s riders. And Phil Daniels gives a thoroughly entertaining performance as the unscrupulous, wheeler-dealing cockney manager, almost half a century on from playing a teenage mod in the Who-inspired film Quadrophenia.
