"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.
David Hare's Teeth 'n' Smiles Returns with a Raw 50th-Anniversary Revival
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.
