Rebecca Lucy Taylor is raising hell in 'Teeth 'n' Smiles'

Rebecca Lucy Taylor aka Self Esteem is returning to the stage as a rock star going off the rails in David Hare’s Teeth ‘n’ Smiles.

Summary

• Singer Rebecca Lucy Taylor (better known as Self Esteem) will star in Teeth 'n' Smiles in the West End
• David Hare's play has not been performed in the capital for 50 years
• The play follows a rock band as it comes apart at the seams at the end of the 60s

It’s hard to think of someone better placed to play 60s rock star Maggie Frisby in David Hare’s anarchic Teeth ‘n’ Smiles than Rebecca Lucy Taylor. The actor/musician better known as Self Esteem came to prominence after the release of her studio album Prioritise Pleasure in 2021. She has since scooped a prestigious Ivor Novello Award (as well as BRIT Award and Mercury Prize nominations), written a book, made her West End debut in Cabaret, and birthed the anthemic album A Complicated Woman. The experimental pop performer is also known for her radical honesty and has crafted an image celebrating self-worth, drawing in a legion of fans who are often heard howling at her concerts during the song “I’m Fine”, as a cathartic release against misogyny.

But this wasn’t always her experience. The 39-year-old from Rotherham actually began her career toiling away as one half of pop-indie band Slow Club, touring the UK and trying to break into a notoriously difficult industry. Her early years in the music world map closely onto Maggie’s experience in Teeth ‘n’ Smiles: she is the lead singer of a male-dominated band at, as Taylor describes it, “the fag end of hope”. The Swinging Sixties are coming to a close and the drug-fuelled freedom once promised by hedonistic band life is now tearing the group apart.

“I have so much experience of it,” says Taylor. “The parts about the waiting, the parts about the drinking, having to sleep on the floor under your coat. Every time we’re touching on those bits in the play, I think what an amazing gift that I’m not doing that right now.”

She continues: “Touring as a young woman in a band, shithole after shithole, you feel awful. I probably was a bit of a nightmare sometimes and I wasn’t fun to be around. [The play] is fun in a self-exploration way.”

Taylor’s journey with Maggie actually began a few years ago, after director Daniel Raggett reached out to say she’d be perfect for the part. Taylor was taking her time to choose the right opportunity after Cabaret and while Teeth ‘n’ Smiles was new to her, she was a fan of Hare’s work (another of his plays, the Ralph Fiennes-led Grace Pervades, opens in the West End in April). The fact that the play in question had a music element to it was “fortuitous”.

So how is she interpreting Maggie, given the character’s journey is so close to her own? “There are so many women in plays and films who have just pressed the self-destruct button, there’s mascara running down their face, they’ve got a pink wig on, they’re sat on an amp, and I feel like we’re fed that version of a woman. A cursory reading of Teeth ‘n’ Smiles, you could think that’s what Maggie is as well, but I think she knows what she’s doing. I don’t think she’s damaged — I think she’s fucking bored. She wants to wring out every bit of life and live it to the extreme.”

Interestingly, Taylor’s comments mirror Hare’s explanation for choosing Helen Mirren as his Maggie for the play’s premiere at the Royal Court in 1975. In The Blue Touch Paper: A Memoir, he said: “I needed an actress who was too intelligent to buy into the newspaper myth of self-destruction. She had to be able to scare the living daylights out of every man she met, but also amaze them with her acumen.” Fifty years on, his latest actress to step into the role could not be a more apt choice, given her history of howling on stage in protest against the patriarchy.

It is unsurprising that Taylor’s first professional roles in theatre share characteristics and life experiences similar to her own, as she reveals so much of herself in her music — let’s not forget this is the same artist who released the song “69”, in which she lists and rates her favourite sex positions. But does she ever feel as though she’s giving away too much of herself, having described this latest role as both “triggering” and “healing”?

“I’ve always loved to be too exposing. That’s the art I like, that’s the kind of actor I like. I’m not really looking for separation.” She reflects for a moment, before continuing: “That’s going to be such an interesting question, the more [acting] I do. I hope I do different role after different role, and I’ll see what my process is going to be with that.”

While Mirren’s Maggie was likened to Janis Joplin, Taylor is clear that she isn’t basing her Maggie on anyone else in the public eye. She is, however, researching women who made music in the 1960s and 70s and, separately, is “thinking a lot about Amy [Winehouse]. I’m thinking a lot about women who get destroyed for entertainment by the industry.”

Taylor’s West End debut as the careless and flighty Sally Bowles in Cabaret in 2023 is an experience she keeps returning to during the rehearsal process for Teeth ‘n’ Smiles. “It’s funny because everyone on this gig [her co-stars include Michael Fox and Phil Daniels] has done a lot of theatre and I’ve got this one experience, and already I’m like, ‘When I did Cabaret’, and everyone’s like, ‘Oh, did you do Cabaret?’” she quips, with her characteristic self-deprecating humour. She feels the roles of Maggie and Sally represent different parts of her experience: whereas Maggie’s outlook echoes the later part of Taylor’s journey, she believes Sally’s hope mirrors her own early path in the music industry. “I’ll still have to prove myself at some point and play, you know, a banana or something,” she says flippantly.

Taylor may have booked her first professional theatre role in her mid-30s, but she says acting was always the plan growing up. The first role she ever wanted to do was Calamity Jane, which she thinks would be an odd choice now, even though her parents would still love her to do it.

She didn’t get into drama school, and before reapplying she was sidetracked by Slow Club. Alongside her conviction that she can play Maggie, Taylor is candid about her imposter syndrome: “I am still constantly ping-ponging between ‘who the fuck do you think you are swanning into this?’ [and the fact] I was always an actress, I was always going to do this, and the universe sent me on a different path to get there.” Also, she adds: “Experience is fucking useful, but [a lack of it] doesn’t need to hold me back.”

The acting may be new, but mastering the music is certainly familiar. Taylor has contributed additional music and lyrics to Nick and Tony Bicât’s original rock ‘n’ roll songs, even creating one entirely new number called “Maggie’s Song”, which she is staying tight-lipped about. It’s not her first time composing music for the stage: she also worked on the 2022 West End production of Prima Facie, starring Jodie Comer, an experience she says gave her a “structural freedom” because Taylor’s “feelings are so vivid and debilitating and when [she] can put them into something positive, it’s a bit of a comfort”.

She is also loving singing songs in Teeth ‘n’ Smiles that aren’t trying to become chart toppers: “It’s not like a cool musician has written versions of what it might have been then. They feel like real songs, by a real band, from a long time ago. For me, music is so much about, ‘please give me a hit, let me go global, please play me on Radio 1’, but because of the history of these songs, they bypass the need to be like [that].”

The play hasn’t been revived in the West End since its transfer to Wyndham’s Theatre 50 years ago. Taylor is wary of launching into a defence of why it is relevant today, because “every theatre show thinks it’s relevant”, but she believes that the realisation that not all is well with the world very much chimes with society’s current mood. “There was the summer of love, and free love, and acid, and they really thought that expanding their minds would make for a better world,” she says. “You join them at the point where they’re realising maybe it’s not going to work. It’s over. It’s that horrible 6am feeling of ‘this isn’t good for you’. I think that dawning doom is very relevant.”

On a lighter note, Taylor says she’s excited about the prospect of attracting non-conventional theatregoing audiences to the show, given her influence across the music and theatre industries. “The more art can keep teaching or educating or being felt — that’s the only thing that’s going to save us. It needs to stay accessible and not just for privileged people.”

And as for what Maggie would make of Self Esteem, Taylor thinks she’d be a fan: “‘How Can I Help You’, ‘Lies’, they’re the songs she’d give her best. There is such a lot of her spirit in there.”

Book Teeth 'n' Smiles tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk

Photo credit: Rebecca Lucy Taylor. (Photo by Jono White). Inset: album cover for A Complicated Woman, in Cabaret. (Photos courtesy of RLT and Marc Brenner)

This article was first published in the March 2026 issue of London Theatre Magazine.