When David Hare’s play, Teeth ‘n’ Smiles, debuted fifty years ago at the Royal Court, anarchic rocker Keith Moon gatecrashed the venue, smashed his car into the side of the theatre and stormed the stage. It was a form of chaos that was apt for the end of the swinging sixties and the start of rock and roll’s savage seventies, and Hare’s play about a rock group on the cusp of oblivion, yet this new revival shows its age half a century later.
The play is inspired by Hare’s own experiences at Cambridge, and his memories of an underwhelming, past their prime, Manfred Mann performing a sorry set at a university ball. In this play, the struggling rocker is Maggie (Rebecca Lucy Taylor aka Self Esteem), struggling with addiction, anxiety and a desire to still hit the right notes. Supported by her band, and slippery cockney manager Saraffian (Phil Daniels), Maggie’s leading act wanes, a character originated by Helen Mirren who based her depiction on Janis Joplin.
As Maggie, Taylor is superb, quickly establishing the character’s frustrating, selfish personality while balancing it with a terrific musical prowess. It certainly helps that Taylor is, as Self Esteem, a gifted musician, and the ease with which Taylor switches from tortured artist to a fading rock icon is striking. It is a painful erosion of Maggie played out in real time, and while the other characters get bogged down in plodding exchanges, Maggie is a bundle of energy that the piece, and ironically, the band, desperately needs. Cast out from the band after the interval, it is a bleak outlook for Maggie, with a vulnerability that Taylor brings out, quickly cut back by the character’s stubborn, deflective resolve.
Meanwhile, Michael Fox’s songwriter, Arthur, boils with frustration at how Maggie is allowed to fester and riot, which slimy Saraffian is brought to life through Daniels’ quick-witted delivery. The rest of the band become an ensemble, drifting in and out in various states of drunken and drugged-up stupors, aside from level-headed Laura (Aysha Kala), Maggie’s childhood friend, in an intoxicated, hedonistic existence that fears or suffers little consequence.
There are some neat moments, especially as the walls around Maggie start to collapse. Matt Daw’s striking lighting design impresses in enhancing the theatricality of the piece’s original music, while Daniel Raggett’s direction of the second half has a steadier pace, reiterating the destruction that anything within Maggie’s orbit seems to suffer.
Throughout the piece, Maggie’s band compete to share the most banal fact they can find. While this production is not quite at that level, there is a lack of urgency at play. Hare, by his own recognition, acknowledges that the script has not aged particularly well, and this piece struggles when meandering through dialogue with little momentum.
Fifty years later, it feels much tamer now, and one wonders, much like the band and their desire for the mundane, what the point of it all is.
