Just as they did in Jez Butterworth's landmark 2009 play Jerusalem, in his newest, The Hills of California, directed by Sam Mendes and now running at the Harold Pinter Theatre in London’s West End, the wide-open plains of imagination and self-actualisation meet the stark cliff-edges of little England. This time we’re in drought-stricken Blackpool in 1976, where the grown-up Webb sisters – mousey Jill (Helena Wilson), girlish Ruby (Ophelia Lovibond) and harried Gloria (Leanne Best) gather at the childhood home, a rickety, capacious former guesthouse called “Sea View”, to attend to their mother, Veronica, who is dying, painfully, behind a closed door at the top of a staircase. There’s another sister though: the eldest, Joan, who is absent; for reasons that the play spends much of its time unpicking, she’s made her escape to California, causing her abandoned sisters to pine, ponder and resent, respectively.
The first two acts of the play are haunted by these two unseen characters – the dying Veronica and the errant Joan – whose ways and actions have set up the testy sisterly interplay we see, which is often very funny (Ruby and Gloria have both brought along their useless husbands, who act as pleasing foils). But Veronica and Joan do appear in flashback scenes, cleverly indicated in Rob Howell’s atmospheric set design: a central staircase rotates from the front parlour, complete with sad tiki bar and broken jukebox, where the 1970s scenes happen, to a prim private parlour at the back where, now in the 1950s, we meet younger incarnations of the sisters and their formidable mother (a commanding Laura Donnelly, who starred in Butterworth’s hit 2017 play The Ferryman and is also his partner).
Steely, wasp-waisted Veronica (pictured above), we learn, had big plans for her girls, envisioning them as a Lancastrian version of the Andrews Sisters. With rising desperation, she drills them in dance routines and close harmonies, winningly performed by the young cast (Nancy Allsop, Nicola Turner, Sophia Ally and Lara Mcdonnell) to help them fulfil their (her?) dreams of the bright lights of the London Palladium and, beyond that, Carnegie Hall. But when opportunity does suddenly come knocking, in the form of a Mr-Wolfish agent (Corey Johnson), the lengths to which Veronica will go – or ask her children to go – take a significantly darker turn that aids understanding of the sisters’ complicated dynamic.
It is here – amid all the love and jealousy and combustible honesty – that the play’s greatest potency lies (not to mention, to anyone with siblings, its relatability); Leanne Best in particular as Gloria, the overshadowed second-in-line, brings a deliciously barbed fury to the role. Butterworth revels in the kitsch specificities and peccadillos of English life (Black Magic chocolates; Datsun cars; excessive, inventive swearing) and is a master of capturing the tragic and exquisite tension between grandiose ambition and crushing parochialism in which our national psyche is held; on the press night, the audience – stacked with a particularly high number of actors in ornamental scarves – were hooting and howling at every line.
In the third act, however, the adult Joan (also played by Donnelly) appears from over the Californian hills, and with her comes some extra – and arguably extraneous – plot twists that slacken the narrative pull. The energy sags a little, and the play’s three-hour running time starts to show. Not that the scarf-wearing actors seemed to mind of course, and the press-night performance – as is weirdly almost always the case at the theatre these days – received a comprehensive standing ovation. With charismatic acting, robust writing and dynamic direction, The Hills of California certainly wasn’t a long way from thoroughly deserving it, if only it had spent a little more time languishing in the knotty psychological web in which the Webb sisters are caught.
'The Hills of California' is on until 15 June, Harold Pinter Theatre, Panton Street, London, haroldpintertheatre.co.uk
Miranda Collinge is the Deputy Editor of Esquire, overseeing editorial commissioning for the brand. With a background in arts and entertainment journalism, she also writes widely herself, on topics ranging from Instagram fish to psychedelic supper clubs, and has written numerous cover profiles for the magazine including Cillian Murphy, Rami Malek and Tom Hardy.
