[After] the first night of David Hare's Teeth 'n' Smiles, there seemed to be one name on everyone's lips—John Osborne. Wasn't it just like early Osborne, old Courtiers were saying. Didn't it carry you back to The Entertainer and those first, electric nights of Look Back in Anger? To which the answer, strictly and properly, should have been no, not really. I've never been among those who find it helpful to think of Bucharest as the Paris of the Balkans, nor would it strike me as flattering to call David Hare, or anyone else, the Osborne of the '70s. Still, because it was obviously shorthand and well-intended, I said yes, I saw what they meant…. [Teeth 'n' Smiles is] a play plugged deep into the rusty, defective socket of contemporary England, popping and sparking with anger at the connection.

The image is Hare's, more or less...