“The acid dream is over!” yells Maggie Frisby, the beleaguered singer with the fictitious rock group the Skins. It’s 1969, and the band, a mid-tier outfit that never quite managed to transcend minor cult status, is performing at a Cambridge University ball. Maggie is unraveling, and her breakdown seems to herald the end of an era.
The turmoil unfolds in a London revival of David Hare’s “Teeth ‘n’ Smiles,” which was a bittersweet hymn to the faded glory of 1960s counterculture when it premiered in 1975. The new 50th-anniversary staging, directed by Daniel Raggett and running at the Duke of York’s Theater through June 6, is, in effect, an elegy to an elegy.
This iteration features the real-life pop singer Rebecca Lucy Taylor in the lead role. Taylor — who spent a decade in the indie-folk duo Slow Club before going solo and earning a Mercury Prize nomination as Self Esteem — is well acquainted with the vicissitudes of the music industry. Her Maggie is an arresting portrait of self-sabotaging hedonism, swigging whiskey from the bottle and strutting around in thigh-high tiger-print boots. When we first meet her, she’s passed-out drunk, carried on the shoulder of a bandmate. It’s a declaration of intent.
By today’s standards, we’d call her problematic. Maggie is callously dismissive of her hapless, smitten ex (played by a hangdog Michael Fox), and physically abusive to her keyboardist (Michael Abubakar). When a young student (Roman Asde) interviews her, she first bullies and then listlessly seduces him. Maggie maintains that she’s in control — tragedy is “like an overcoat. I pick it up, I sling it off,” she says — but an exit sign at the back of the stage gives us a subtle, portentous hint of where things are headed.
There’s little back story and minimal plot; this play is more about mood than action. Maggie’s male bandmates kill time by batting around amusingly inane trivia. (One of them shoots heroin and crawls around in a catatonic stupor.) Their collective exasperation at Maggie’s antics builds to a crisis, and it falls to the band’s manager, the cynical Cockney wheeler-dealer Saraffian (Phil Daniels), to drop the ax.
Daniels, who played a similar role in the 1979 Who-inspired movie “Quadrophenia,” is the play’s most engaging presence: His Saraffian is a voice of hard-nosed reason amid the chaos — reminding us that music is a business like any other — but with a droll, phlegmatic delivery that recalls the beloved British comedian Ronnie Corbett.
The show is punctuated by eight live songs, which the band performs on a moving platform that shunts the musicians to the very edge of the stage, the better to commune with the audience. The sound is powerful and the musicianship accomplished, but the tunes, all but one of which are by Nick and Tony Bicât, are melodically unmemorable for the most part — it’s no wonder the band never made it big. The exceptions are two quietly affecting solo numbers, “Arthur’s Song” (sung by Fox), and “Maggie’s Song,” a folksy acoustic ballad by Taylor herself.
The figure of the off-the-rails rock star has ossified into cliché in the half-century since Helen Mirren debuted the Maggie role at the Royal Court Theater in London, and the “hot mess” trope has more recently become commonplace. Since we meet Maggie at the very point of collapse, our investment in her travails is somewhat unearned. And without the requisite empathy, she can seem more like a child throwing a tantrum than a woman in the grip of existential anguish.
If “Teeth ’n’ Smiles” doesn’t enthrall as a character study, it’s still an intriguing curio, and the play’s campus setting allows Hare to spotlight the evolving social mores of the period. In the glee with which Maggie’s bandmates rush offstage to sleep with the undergraduates, and their specific delight at conquering “posh” girls, we see the convergence of the permissive society and a simmering class antagonism. And their liberal use of expletives would have felt edgy in 1975, just a year before the Sex Pistols scandalized the British public by swearing volubly on live television.
Like many of her generation, Maggie laments that “the revolution” has come to nothing. I was reminded of the hippie drug-dealer Danny in the 1987 movie “Withnail and I,” also set in 1969: “The greatest decade in the history of mankind is over,” he says, and “we have failed to paint it black.” That sense of disappointment is a recurring mood in stage and screen portrayals of the late ’60s — the romance of a failed but glorious attempt to change the world.
“The ship is sinking / but the music stays the same,” Maggie sings in the play’s closing number. Yet fifty years on, a good deal has changed. The louche, emotionally distant affections of counterculture have given way to a more earnest, expansive and therapeutically literate pop sensibility, of which Taylor herself is an example. The fact that we live in an era in which someone can unironically take Self Esteem as a stage name says it all. It’s not a revolution, but it’s something.
Teeth ’n’ Smiles
Through June 6 at the Duke of York’s Theater in London; thedukeofyorks.com.
The post A Pop Diva and a Flamed-Out Rock Music Revolution appeared first on New York Times.
