‘I know having children will massively affect my career’

Rebecca Lucy Taylor, aka Self Esteem, has successfully made the pivot from music to acting, starring in a major West End show. She tells Jessie Thompson why the role feels personal.

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Rebecca Lucy Taylor – aka the pop star Self Esteem – recently woke up with two cold sores on her face.

And that was just the start of it. “I felt very disturbed emotionally on Thursday,” she tells me, sipping a cup of tea. “I’m out of my depth and my comfort zone.” To blame? The unlikeliest theatrical collaboration of the year: Taylor is starring in a West End revival of David Hare’s 1975 play Teeth ’n’ Smiles.

He’s a septuagenarian statesman of British theatre, who once wrote a theatrical portrait of Neil Kinnock so savage that the former Labour leader called it “the most uncomfortable three hours of my life”. She’s been deemed the musical oracle for female millennials; her gigs feature defiant choreography andwomen barking like dogs, and her official merch store sells a scarf emblazoned with the word “HELP!!!!!!!!!!!”. An unexpected pairing, you might say.

For Taylor, though, the play feels very close to home. Teeth ’n’ Smiles, which opens at the Duke of York’s Theatre this month, is about a disillusioned, spiralling rock star called Maggie Frisby, whose self-destructive behaviour threatens to tear her band apart. “The more I mine for the gold in it, it’s crazy. Like, she feels exactly like I feel right now,” Taylor tells me one morning at the Bethnal Green rehearsal rooms. “I think this might really fuck me up if I’m not careful.”

Maggie, first played by Helen Mirren in the original Royal Court production (where Keith Moon tried to gatecrash the show), seems nihilistic, as if she doesn’t care about anything. But it’s more complicated than that. “Her frustration is: I’ve done everything I can. I’m fucking good at what I do. I’ve delivered, and it’s just not happening for me.”