The Hills of California: Laura Donnelly shines in Jez Butterworth’s bold MeToo drama
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Jez Butterworth, the most venerated British playwright of his generation, has enjoyed some of his greatest successes dwelling in the realms of the rural – Wiltshire in the all-conquering Jerusalem and County Armagh in The Ferryman. Now he shifts his focus towards the metropolitan for his latest opus (directed – as that last hit was – by Sam Mendes).
We’re not, though – as the title might have us jumping to conclude – anywhere near LA. The setting is an old guest house in Blackpool, with Americanised room-names, during the long, drought-hot summer of 1976. The gaff is called Sea View but lacks one, a fact gleaned from an early exchange between the fretful Jill (a pallid, sympathetically careworn Helena Wilson) and the nurse who has come to tend to her mother, Veronica, dying from cancer in a room upstairs.
Rob Howell’s mighty, and shadowy, set incorporates an Escher-like tease of stairways. Will we get a glimpse of the ailing matriarch? That’s one area of obvious suspense. But the burning question occupying Jill’s mind, and consequently that of two sisters (Ophelia Lovibond’s self-possessed Ruby and Leanne Best’s grouchily gobby Gloria), is whether the black-sheep of the family, their other sister Joan, will show her face before the final curtain falls. She has been estranged from her mother for some 20 years and relocated to the States. It soon becomes apparent that Jill is protracting her mother’s life in the hope of an 11th hour rapprochement.
Death is no stranger to Butterworth’s plays. But the mortality here is very close to home, and what’s being addressed is the fundamental stuff; how do we face the loss of someone very close to us, who has damaged us?
The reason for the rift is laid bare as the stage revolves and the ramshackle bar-area in the sweltering Seventies gives way to a Fifties-era parlour where Laura Donnelly’s Veronica is madly grooming the school-girl incarnations of the four sisters for showbiz success.
Glam, forthright and independent (their father is absent, the story around him suspect) she croons and coaches them in the songs of the day (including Johnny Mercer’s The Hills of California). And this typical pushy parent prevails on one of the residents to bring over a big American talent-scout, before whom the quartet – whom she wants to be the next Andrews Sisters – perform Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy, all perfect grins. It’s Joan who catches his eye; just 15 and eager to please.
Though it’s a commendably female-dominated evening (Ruby and Gloria’s husbands are derisory, ancillary figures), a shaming light is shone on predatory and presumptuous male behaviour in both eras. There may be some debate about the #metoo aspect of the storyline, which broaches female complicity in abuse; it’s a bold move for a man to tackle this subject. Of more pressing, prosaic concern for me was that the evening, running to almost three hours, just needs a trim and a less languid pace.
The dialogue displays Butterworth’s usual élan (“Up in town it’s all ‘kiss-me-quick, mine’s a Choc-Ice’ - out here in the backstreets, carnage!”), but it can sound too scripted. And it takes an age for the climactic, neatly twisty scene that finds him at the height of his powers, showing how the attempt by a wounded off-spring to ‘move on’ can still reflect that hurt, and articulating the pathos of that through the affected bravura of the hippy generation. It’s smart, ambitious fare, no question, the cast serve it with aplomb, and the final half-hour works like a dream. But, even so, it’s an uphill slog to get there, and we’re some distance from the hallowed triumph of Jerusalem.
Until June 15. Tickets: hillsofcaliforniaplay.com
