It’s 5pm on St Martin’s Lane and Rebecca Lucy Taylor is hanging backwards over the Duke of York’s Theatre balcony, belting her lungs out. She’s there in the guise of Maggie Frisby: whirlwind, rock star, force of nature. For the past six weeks — and until June 6 — Taylor has been portraying the unpredictable lead in the theatre’s all-singing, all-self-destructing revival of David Hare’s 1975 play Teeth ’n‘ Smiles. A show she’s been describing as “what the music industry does to women”, it’s not a stretch to see what attracted the multi-hyphenate artist most commonly known as award-winning, festival-headlining pop disruptor Self Esteem to the role.
Taylor is clearly getting a kick out of Maggie and the set of unlikely milestones that come with her: not least the chance to join the canon of figures who have sung from rooftops. “Evita, The Beatles on a roof… everything about Teeth ’n‘ Smiles is taking some more glossy theatre thing or band thing that’s done all this before, and we’re just the horrible, smelly inverse,” Taylor hoots with a loud, infectious cackle, sitting in her dressing room the following day. “We’re the horrible, smelly inverse of [previous Duke of York’s rock ’n’ roll musical] Stereophonic, and I love it. I love celebrating that and not feeling in competition with it.”
Seeing the funny side of life in an often ridiculous industry has always been a core part of Self Esteem’s charm. For her 2022 Glastonbury performance, the Sheffield singer sported a Madonna-referencing bra shaped like the domes of her home city’s Meadowhall Shopping Centre. During a London headline show for her landmark Mercury Prize-nominated second album Prioritise Pleasure, she brought Mr Blobby out on stage as her special guest. She’s a hoot to be around, with a list of hilarious celebrity pals including Nicola Coughlan and Big Boys writer Jack Rooke to prove it.
But, for a while, this overriding sense of competition and pressure threatened to extinguish Taylor’s innate spark for good. Prioritise Pleasure changed her life and turned her worldview into something with currency. When it came time to write its hugely anticipated follow-up, last year’s A Complicated Woman, Taylor found herself consciously trying to keep the momentum going. “And that attitude doesn’t work — or it doesn’t work on someone like me,” she says. “I didn’t completely sell out — and obviously it’s still a f***ing weird record with loads of completely uncommodifiable things on it — but [even bigger success] was on my mind, and it didn’t work, and the fact that I compromised anything at all artistically made my mental health really bad.”
When you’re going through something of a creative crisis, it doesn’t help if you’ve been heralded as the poster artist for a wave of modern female empowerment. “It felt very deceitful,” she admits. “When I wasn’t believing in my own bullshit last year, I thought, ‘You’re a f***ing liar. You’re a bad person.’” Burnt out from the relentless chase, Taylor knew something had to change.
“My therapist had been saying on repeat that I wrote Prioritise Pleasure in the pandemic when I’d started training to be a keep fit instructor online, and I just let go of all [the industry noise] and made my best music,” Taylor recalls. “She’d say, ‘You need to get that mindset back’ and I’d think, well how the hell do I ever do that? Turns out all you need to do is lead a West End play…”
Rebecca Lucy Taylor by numbers
5 Number of albums Taylor’s first band Slow Club released during their 11-year stint
2 Number of solo artist names Taylor was torn between — she eventually chose Self Esteem over Sex Appeal
2021 Year Self Esteem won BBC Introducing Artist of the Year
1 Books Taylor has written: A Complicated Woman, an “anti-Bible of womanhood”
1975 Year Teeth ’n‘ Smiles was first performed, although it’s set in 1969
2023 Year Taylor first performed in the West End as Sally Bowles in Cabaret
If her first West End turn as Sally Bowles in Cabaret back in 2023 underlined her as not just a singer but a triple threat, then Teeth ’n‘ Smiles has fulfilled an even deeper role: that of visibly giving Taylor her mojo back. “I’ll be so grateful for this job forever,” she says. “When it finishes, I’ll need to go into a facility because it’s done so much for me.” Last time I spoke to her ahead of the release of A Complicated Woman, she was frazzled and overstretched, balancing a hefty and anticipation-loaded promotional schedule with somehow trying to remain serene and healthy. The version of Taylor that barrels into her dressing room today, apologising profusely for being stuck in traffic and clutching a (clean) sick bin from having accompanied her bandmate to A&E after a nasty bout of food poisoning last night is like a whole different person.
She’s made the room cosy and homely, with sheepskin slippers on the floor, congratulatory cards everywhere and a fridge full of Tenzing as her only major vice. If, six weeks into a tour, you’d expect a musician to be knackered and flagging, six weeks into this run Taylor looks a picture of wellbeing in sports-casual downtime gear and a general Women’s Health cover glow.
Interrogating the main theme of the play — that “the music is all that matters” — has been huge for her, but so has the general stability of the theatre world in comparison to the music industry that she’s spent the past two decades in, first as part of indie duo Slow Club and, for the past 10 years, as Self Esteem. “I’m paid a wage for this, whereas as a musician you’re working indefinitely for nothing. And obviously, sometimes, something comes in, but I like being a paid member of society. I spent all this time being like, ‘I’m not like everyone else, I want to be outside the box.’ Whereas actually, I’d love to be inside the box. There’s a reason the box is there.”
Taylor’s career is full of strange discrepancies that feel like particularly modern problems. On one hand, she is the recipient of the 2025 Ivor Novello Visionary Award for her songwriting: unquestionable proof not just of her skill, but of how important her voice has become among the current musical landscape. On the other, she’ll readily admit that her streaming numbers leave something to be desired. “Ain’t nobody streaming that shit!” she laughs. “It’s like cobwebs on my Spotify!” It means that, even though she can top the bill at Green Man or End of the Road festival, and sell 15,000 tickets in London (as she did over three nights at Hammersmith Apollo), she’s still having to constantly think about finances. “There’s something in my soul that feels like, if I’m gonna sit and look at some awful budget that’s weighed heavily not in my favour and know that I’ve got to do it anyway — that feeling has to go,” she shrugs.
There have been other huge contrasts highlighted over the past six weeks, too. The simple difference in “not seeing a big round-up of what I look like every night [on social media]” has been game-changing. “And any second guessing that I do have, I’ll remind myself that you need to see women [of different sizes] because if this wasn’t me, Maggie would absolutely be cast as an emaciated waif because these kinds of female characters are always vulnerable in that way,” she notes wryly. “So I’m really proud that, in the play, everyone is obsessed with Maggie and men cannot get over her, and I’m a…” she searches for the word, before landing, with a snort, on “unit”. “I’m me, and I’m in my skin and proudly so, and we need to see that in media.”
As she prepared for the role, Taylor rewatched Asif Kapadia’s documentary about Amy Winehouse and films such as John Cassavetes’s 1977 psychological drama Opening Night — narratives where “women were disruptive and not being normal, but they weren’t damaged with mascara running down their face and defeated. They were resilient but difficult, which is what I wanted Maggie to be.” Teeth ’n‘ Smiles positions Maggie as an artist with ambitions far too big for the rapidly crumbling 1960s dream that she’s found herself at the tail end of. She gets blind drunk to deal with the frustration of it all, but is merely treated as an annoyance by the equally drug and booze-addled men around her who depend on her star quality.
“It’s some caveman shit where women can’t do anything without it being scrutinised”
Fifty years on from Hare’s original script, Taylor suggests little has changed when it comes to how the world treats so-called “difficult women”. “I think there’s better protection in place for artists in general. They get on it more quickly because they’ve learnt from the Amys,” she says, “but it’s some caveman shit where we can’t do anything without it being scrutinised, whereas men can do anything they want.
“Becoming visible in a way I hadn’t been before, my taste of the way people f***ing hate women — especially women who aren’t behaving in an extremely traditional way — shut me up for a bit. It was horrible. It just felt like it wasn’t worth it — it was too scary,” she continues. “There’s one rule for men and one rule for anyone who isn’t a straight man, because gay men are f***ed over and ruled by an insane standard compared to straight men too. It’s not just gender.”
There’s an awful lot of Taylor’s own story in Maggie. When she declares in Act One that “in reality I’m not really here, I’m 50ft tall”, you can picture the singer as an increasingly unsatisfied twentysomething in Slow Club, dreaming of the pop behemoth she would go on to create. Amusingly, when Taylor was previously trying to break into the acting world following a string of failed drama school auditions, she once wrote a script with a very similar concept. “One of my ideas was that everyone would be a cast of quite short people apart from me, and it wouldn’t be a thing or explained why but I’d just appear huge,” she remembers. “And it’s funny because I’m taller than all the boys here, so I finally got my dream.”
Having spent years in the indie trenches with her first band, the unhealthy relationship between the music industry and substance abuse is also an all-too-familiar one for the singer. “Since I was 18, I’ve had a job where you can just be pissed doing it, and that’s encouraged. I see now how much of my time was spent around active addiction that was normalised,” she considers. Though she never truly went off the deep end, Taylor wasn’t immune to the enabling attitude around her. “I think I used to be self-destructive in a substances sense to fit in, and then to f***ing cope when it got real,” she says. “If you’re playing the part of another person all the time, there’s nothing more useful than being a bit pissed to help you perk yourself up enough to do it.”
The music industry, she suggests, glamorises “a very nostalgic idea of itself — we can’t shake the history of the Rolling Stones doing however many bags of whatever, and so you grow up watching and consuming an idea of the music industry based on that. I’m so f***ing glad that Lola Young stopped to sort it out because that wouldn’t have happened a few years ago,” she continues. “If you’re making people money, [they don’t care about you]. It’s really scary, and if I’d had any success any earlier I’d have fared very badly I reckon.”
Though, as Self Esteem, Taylor has had to forcibly kick down a lot of the doors herself that have granted her entry into the upper echelons of British music, there is the sense that — long and hard as much of the journey may have been — things have perhaps happened in the way that’s best served her long-term. Her resilience and refusal to accept the status quo has made her one of the past decade’s most vital lyricists. The hustle of her first decade in the industry has lit a fire not just under her portrayal of Maggie, but in everything that she does. “I don’t know what my music would have been like if I didn’t have to struggle to make it,” she muses. “There’s some chemical level of peril that you have if you’re not from privilege that probably makes the sort of work I like more.”
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It’s not that the theatre world is perfect — “obviously there’s a ton of privileged white people in theatre,” she notes — but there’s something about the infrastructure and the “safety” of it all that’s been giving her what she needs. “The amount of hands on deck to make sure I’m going to be OK and I can just focus on the show — it’s magic,” she sighs.
Around the release of A Complicated Woman, Taylor moved from Margate to Dalston, becoming, she jokes, “exactly who I take the piss out of”. When Teeth ’n‘ Smiles is finished, she’s planning on using London’s cultural spoils to carry out her own version of Lady Gaga’s pre-Artpop education. “She went and did some self-enforced schooling and learnt from amazing artists like Marina Abramović, so I’m gonna do my budget version of that which is going to visit the Tate a bit more and seeing if Tracey Emin will chat,” she chuckles.
“When I started Self Esteem I remember thinking, ‘You don’t have to end up happy. You’ve just got to be a martyr to try to change shit for girls like me who feel like shit.’ And then over the years I have become quite happy, and I don’t want to flay myself anymore, but I also don’t want to just be cosy and tiny,” she affirms, getting up to start her pre-show routine ahead of another night under the restorative lights of the theatre that might just have saved the future of Self Esteem. “I want to get back to feeding my brain, and I feel like I could cry with joy that I’ve worked out what it is I need to do in order to get there.”
Teeth ‘n’ Smiles is at Duke of York’s Theatre until June 6; thedukeofyorks.com
