Fifty years after Helen Mirren originated the role, Rebecca Lucy Taylor AKA Self Esteem is to play a raging rock star in a West End revival of Teeth ’n’ Smiles by David Hare.
It will take Taylor back to the Duke of York’s theatre, where she performed a four-night “theatrical presentation” of her third album, A Complicated Woman, in April. In Hare’s 1975 play she takes the lead role of a singer, Maggie, in an imploding band who put on a concert for a Cambridge University May ball at the end of the 1960s. The mood is summed up by the band’s closing number, Last Orders on the Titanic. Taylor will contribute additional music and lyrics to original song by the brothers Nick and Tony Bicât respectively.
Daniel Raggett will direct the production, which opens in March and runs for 12 weeks. Tickets will go on sale in October. “I’m deeply honoured to be bringing Teeth ’n’ Smiles back for its 50th anniversary,” said Taylor. “I love to challenge myself in new forms and I can’t wait to slap you round the face with Maggie. I am a huge fan of Daniel and David’s work, and the chance to collaborate with them on such a landmark production is something I am insanely excited about.”
Taylor spent a decade in the indie duo Slow Club and released her solo debut album as Self Esteem, Compliments Please, in 2019. It was followed by Prioritise Pleasure, named the best album of 2021 by Guardian music critics. Taylor made her theatrical debut as Sally Bowles in Cabaret at the Playhouse in London in 2023. Next month marks the publication of her first book, A Complicated Woman, billed as “a cathartic scream … that gets to the heart of being a woman in the world today”.
“I can’t think of anything more exciting than watching Rebecca Lucy Taylor and Daniel Raggett strip the varnish off my old play,” Hare said. “It’s a perfect moment to see if a new generation responds to that 70s mix of hope, drugs, music, sex and despair.”
Teeth ’n’ Smiles was first staged at the Royal Court in 1975, with a cast including Antony Sher, and transferred to the West End the following year. The role of Maggie was compared to Janis Joplin, and the Guardian’s Michael Billington wrote that Hare “captures precisely that moment in a culture when a dream explodes. Like John Osborne in The Entertainer, he realises there is poetry and pathos in the spectacle of decline.”
In 2002, Hare’s play was revived at the Crucible in Sheffield by director Anna Mackmin, with Amanda Donohoe as Maggie.
“I first read David’s play over a decade ago and it seared itself into my brain,” Raggett said. “It’s an extraordinary picture of a world, and a band, tearing itself apart at the seams, shot through with some really great songs. Its spirit of rock’n’roll revolution and desperate howl of defiance feels just as pertinent now as it did in 1975.”
Raggett’s production at the Duke of York’s comes hot on the heels of another drama about a combustible rock band, Stereophonic, a five-star hit that is currently booking at the same theatre until late November.
