Teeth 'n' Smiles Tickets

Playwright David Hare has always been very good when writing about endings and loss. If one of his early plays, Plenty, charted the collapse of post-war hope, then his 1975 play, Teeth ‘n’ Smiles, is an abrasive eulogy for the 1960s, the hope it promised and the dreams it trashed. The play was quite something at the Royal Court 50 years ago, and it gets a revival by Daniel Raggett that, with any luck, will be revelatory. At its heart is Maggie, a small-time rock star—here played by Rebecca Lucy Taylor (Self Esteem)—whose band is playing a May ball at a Cambridge college in 1969. What can go wrong does go wrong with incendiary consequences. 

After that you may well need a laugh, and that’s guaranteed with the excellent Jane Austen improvised show, Austentatious, which is playing on selected Monday evenings only at the Vaudeville between now and July. It’s daft but highly enjoyable, as at every performance, a crack improv team delivers a brand-new, completely improvised Jane Austen novel which she definitely didn’t write—but should have. There's ingenuity aplenty and lots of gags too. You almost certainly need to have some knowledge of Austen’s oeuvre to really get it, but it’s genuinely smart stuff which is both devoted to Jane and also knows that she is ripe for a joke. 

It’s a piece of casting news that gives us a sense of enormous wellbeing, and makes us happy for the rest of the day…

Phil Daniels (Quadrophenia, Blur’s Parklife) will star opposite the previously announced Ivor Novello Award winner Rebecca Lucy Taylor (aka Self Esteem) in David Hare’s rebel play, Teeth ‘n’ Smiles.

Taylor and Daniels will be joined by Michael Fox (Downton Abbey) as Arthur, Bill Caple (Dear England) as Nash, Michael Abubakar (Romeo & Juliet) as Wilson, Samuel Jordan (Standing at the Sky’s Edge) as Smegs, Jojo Macari (Masters of the Air) as Peyote, Noah Weatherby (Mary Page Marlowe) as Inch, Joseph Evans (Cyrano) as Randolph, Aysha Kala (Shameless) as Laura, Christopher Patrick Nolan (Macbeth) as Snead and Roman Asde (Bacchae) as Anson. Gregor Milne, Damien James, Levi Heaton, Guy Amos and Daniel Crespin complete the company.