Theatre review: Teeth'N'Smiles

The ultimate accolade shouldn't be a gold record, it should be a golden hypodermic. Parklife!

David Hare's play with songs Teeth Apostrophe N Apostrophe Smiles, which premiered at the Royal Court in 1975, is set six years earlier in 1969, when disillusionment with rock music and the counterculture it spearheaded was starting to set in. Maggie Frisby and The Skins are a once-popular group on its last legs, doing tours around UK universities that barely cover their expenses - Rebecca Lucy Taylor Also Known As Self Esteem plays vocalist Maggie, with Michael Abubakar, Bill Caple, Samuel Jordan, Jojo Macari and Noah Weatherby as a band at various levels of frustration at the way their careers have turned out. Maggie is a former heroin addict, but while we're given no reason to doubt that she's given that up, she's still unapologetically and indisputably an alcoholic who may or may not perform on any given night - it's the shows she's really looking forward to that the band know to be most worried about.

Theatre review: Dido, Queen of Carthage

The Swanamaker continues to troll Shakespeare's ghost by creating its own version of the Boy Players he disliked. For their second annual production The Globe Young Players take on Christopher Marlowe's Dido, Queen of Carthage, with a lot of familiar faces returning from last year's The Malcontent (although some of the faces are slightly higher up, having grown a bit. Teenagers will do that if you're not careful.) Aeneas (Guy Amos) leads a fleet of Trojan soldiers who've managed to escape the wreckage of Troy, with a mission to resettle in Italy, only to be shipwrecked off the coast of Libya. The Carthaginians were sympathetic to the Trojan cause so they meet with a warm reception, but Aeneas' mother is the goddess Venus (Tamla Tutankhamun,) so just to be sure she gets Cupid (Benjamin Clarke) to make Queen Dido (Jasmine Jones) fall madly in love with her son.

Theatre review: The Malcontent

Shakespeare's Globe has for the most part been in the true spirit of the playwright it celebrates, but the conclusion of its first indoor season would probably have him spinning in his grave as it resurrects one of his pet hates: Grumbled about in Hamlet for their annoying tendency to steal his punters, the boy players were a popular feature of the Jacobean stage, and particularly associated with the indoor, candlelit playhouses the Swanamaker recreates. John Marston wrote The Malcontent for one such boys' company, which makes it an apt - and peculiarly enlightening - choice for their own version: The Globe Young Players aren't an all-male troupe, but they do use gender-blind casting, so there's still a few boys playing girls, alongside the odd girl playing a boy. And they're all aged between 12 and 16, even if their characters and what they get up to - not just in sexual shenanigans but also in cynicism - are much older.