TEETH 'N' SMILES, Duke Of York's

The high-water mark of 60s culture has been and gone, leaving a trail of detritus in which capricious rocker Maggie Frisby finds herself. By 1969 she is broken and burned out, reduced to performing with her band to an indifferent audience of students at a Cambridge May Ball, fulled by Johnnie Walker and self-loathing. The promise of social and artistic revolution has faded with the dawn of the 1970s.

Like Maggie, David Hare's Teeth 'n' Smiles is also out of time. You can sense the kind of splash it would have made when it premiered in 1975, facing down the dawn of punk and the Angry Young Men with youthful fury. But its class politics and countercultural edge have been blunted by the years.

Maggie’s bare-knuckled breakdown is a whirlwind of fiery nihilism playing out in real time. She has been pushed to breaking point by her manager, an wheeler dealer mogul Saraffian, a gorgeously unctuous Phil Daniels, who has arrived unannounced to sack her; the acid tinged artistic dream crushed by the weight of commercial reality. Her devil-may-care bandmates are beyond caring, hunting, animalistically, for their next narcotic hit. Amongst the car crash her ex-Arthur has also arrived, hoping for romantic reconciliation.

What insight have the intervening decades given us? Arthur’s navel-gazing idealism is too self-aggrandising to resonate. Nor does Maggie's melodramtic rage against the dying of the light echo down the generations. She frets and wails, in a way that feels distinctly written by a bloke, her anguish rarely transcending the confines of the era. Not that I can speak on behalf of a generation, but young people today have a lot more to worry about than losing their artistic integrity. 

The production lives and dies on the music. Rebecca Lucy Taylor, aka Self Esteem, exudes breezy charm as Maggie, and injects gigawatts of electricity into the room via showstopping vocals. Songs by Nick and Tony Bicât have a rough edged, lived-in quality, less polished rock than ragged village hall, which gorgeously parallels the sense of the band running on fumes. You can sense Taylor works overtime to conjure Maggie's soul. Her pop-star magnetism is never in doubt; it's the character's inner life that eludes her, or perhaps eludes Hare's aged script, syrupy and romantic, doing little to mask its subtext, and populated by one too many cookie cutter characters: the band are one note maniacs, Anson the effete student is too cartoonishly nebbish to be believable.

There’s fun to be had in Daniel Raggett's production, stripping away distraction and funnelling all attention onto Maggie’s slow-motion implosion. But like its melancholy rockers drunk on memories of a greater high, this play feels dated. 

Teeth 'n' Smiles plays at the Duke of York's Theatre until 6 June