"Right, let's smash up the place." It is 1969 and the band has just arrived at Jesus College, Cambridge to play the May ball. Lead singer Maggie is having an intimate affair with Johnny Walker, Peyote is off his head on several illegal substances and the other band members are hanging around, their inertia so extreme that nobody can be bothered to change a plug so they can play the first set.
David Hare's 1975 hit was very much a play of its time. It came out of an era when people thought that rock'n'roll would change the world, and Maggie's corrosive despair is of one who realises that, in the band's third set, the revolution has been cancelled due to lack of interest. Those out front don't want it.
Almost 30 years on, in Anna Mackmin's exuberantly enjoyable production, Teeth 'n' Smiles is a reminder that the revolution has still not taken place and rock'n'roll sure isn't going to facilitate it. We now watch the piece with the benefit of hindsight, aware among other things, that Mick Jagger can now appear slightly posher than the queen.
The play is also a reminder of how much Hare is a postwar playwright. It is not about the beginning of something - as the 1960s are so often portrayed - but the end of the postwar dream that a good free education would be available to all, leading to the storming of the dreaming spires. For all its high jinks, it is a play about defeat. A defiant defeat that Amanda Donohoe's jagged Maggie displays in her eyes, her quicksilver tongue, her body movements and, most of all, in the throaty wail of her final song, Last Orders on the Titantic. Maggie knows that we are all going down, and we won't even notice.
Mackmin's production cleverly balances the energy of a rock concert with terminal ennui, Hare's string of one liners ensure a good time is had by all, and it is a compliment to a talented ensemble of actors that so many of them are completely unrecognisable. It is almost impossible to watch Teeth 'n' Smiles without being aware of the terrible irony that Hare went from this to The Breath of Life. Maybe, like Maggie, he just got tired.
· Until November 23. Box office: 0114-249 6000.
