GREAT SONGS, SHAME ABOUT THE SCRIPT

Rebecca Lucy Taylor (AKA Self Esteem) plays Maggie, lead singer of a band fallen on hard times, headlining a 1969 Oxford college ball in David Hare's painfully dated 1975 play.

-  STEFAN KYRIAZIS

TEETH 'N' SMILES ★★ DUKE OF YORK'S THEATRE, UNTIL JUNE 6 teethnsmilesplay.​com

Basically, the songs are great, electrifyingly performed and staged. Shame about the script and some of the acting.

She's carried on unconscious, plied with booze and then swaggers and staggers around scattering bitter and biting commentary on the state of music, her own life and everyone else.

Taylor is vividly mercurial but the role is paper thin, Janis Joplin-lite. We have no sense what has shaped her or what lies beneath her disillusion and affected disinterest. Yet, she’s a toweringly complex figure of Lady Macbethean proportions compared to the motley bunch of cardboard cutouts around her.

Her bandmates get one defining characteristic, like gurning addict or groupie chaser, if they're lucky.

Endlessly shouting or stumbling about, shooting up or amusingly (yawn) wearing a woman's party frock, they're like a tiresome failed Young Ones sketch.

Maggie's ex, songwriter Arthur (Michael Fox), mopes and croons Cole Porter while shifty manager Saraffian (Phil Daniels) is an excruciatingly cliched Cockney spiv, ready to prop up the bar in Only Fools and Horses.

Frankly, if it were played as a riotous comedy, it might work.

As it is, cracking music aside, it’s like pulling teeth searching for any point.

No smiles in sight.

HADESTOWN

Yet more Elysian treats from this sublime five-star musical that mixes Ancient Greek myth with folk-fused New Orleans jazz to tell the story of Orpheus and Eurydice at London's Lyric theatre.