A war of attrition?

Teeth ‘n’ Smiles begins with a call to destructive action. The play seems to declare itself as a piece of aggressive confrontation where it is right to smash things up and in which the audience is invoked as ‘us’. The ‘them’ under attack is, however, not immediately clear. As at the opening of Knuckle, there is a deliberate refusal to identify the place for what it is. Cambridge and the May Ball of 9 June 1969 remain unnamed until after the members of a minor cult band have been lived with. For the band on the road it might as well be Canterbury, but Cambridge is to education what Canterbury is to the church and in some sense it is an oppositional subculture which is at centre stage.

With the dropped aitches, expletives and loose syntax of working-class accents, with their clear aggression to Snead, the college porter, and dislike of Anson, the fumbling medical student, who represent the university on stage, the band is apparently engaged in a class-based aggression. The length and romanticism of Anson's verbal seduction of the lead singer Maggie contrasts with the pithiness of her highly contemporary description of the act as ‘for thirty minutes it is like trying to push a marshmallow into a coinbox’ (p. 49). In parodying Lady Capulet's speech on Paris in Romeo and Juliet (Act One Scene Four), Anson belongs to the same literary world of ‘high’ quotation as Arthur the songwriter who, sitting alone on stage at the beginning of Act Two, quotes verse.