Flawless Mendes magic, but these four sisters left me cold
The Hills Of California (Harold Pinter Theatre, London) Verdict: Synthetic nostalgia ★★★✩✩
AS YoU would expect from a new play by Jez Butterworth, starring his partner Laura Donnelly, and directed by Sir Sam Mendes, The Hills of California is a flawless, top- ofthe-range night out.
Butterworth is still justly famed for his 2009 work Jerusalem, which starred Mark rylance, and Donnelly won an olivier award for her role in Butterworth’s hit, The Ferryman — which was also directed by Mendes.
Why, then, I wondered, was I left so unmoved by a drama about four sisters in Seventies Blackpool returning to the draughty guesthouse that was their childhood home, where their mother now lies dying?
The house is called Seaview and inevitably lacks a view of the sea.
Nostalgia for choc-ices is evoked by the setting — the heatwave of 1976. And a ready Brek glow is deepened by the sisters’ memories of their Fifties childhood as a teenage quartet, drilled by their martinet mother (Donnelly) to sing boogie-woogie numbers like the Andrews Sisters.
The mother’s mission is to see the girls on stage at the London Palladium, singing The Hills of California — a song by Johnny Mercer and The Pied Pipers. Nothing will stand in her way.
But there are also dramatic twists. As a teenager, disruptive big sister Joan (Lara McDonnell) catches the eye of an American music promoter. And then, as an adult (now played by Donnelly... keep up!) she misses her flight home from California and may not make it back in time for her mother’s passing.
Butterworth’s writing is typically clever, thanks to cunning little deceits like the remark that ‘mothers don’t have favourites’.
The symbolic guilt of the mother’s stomach cancer is also matched by the sisters who, like the family’s piano, need retuning after being left damaged by salty air, damp and neglect.
And the nerdish detail of Butterworth’s research reaches its arcane apotheosis with a speech in praise of the internal mechanisms of a vinyl jukebox.
Even so, I struggled to get emotionally involved. Who was I meant to be rooting for?
Not the one- track- minded mother, desperate to send her children to Tinseltown.
Not the sisters either — whether as obedient, hot-housed teenagers, or embittered thirtysomethings drifting into mid-life blues.
Moreover, Butterworth sidesteps significant questions around euthanasia, abortion and foster care, any of which might have provided a theatrical jugular.
It’s not a question of the cast under-performing — in fact the reverse is true. Donnelly is made of steel and ice as the disciplinarian mother who is as relentless in her ambition for her daughters as she is tragically isolated by her monomania.
And, although she is too cool to take any interest in her siblings when she returns as the older Joan (now a bona fide Californian rock chick), I suspect awards will come raining down on her.
Leanne Best ignites the stage with a volcanic temper — and a facial expression like a hunting knife — as Joan’s sister Gloria, while ophelia Lovibond quakes alarmingly as ruby, beset by unexplained panic attacks. But the most sympathetic sister is Helena Wilson’s pale, bespectacled, stay-at-home youngest, Jill, who radiates optimism. There’s also a nice turn from Bryan Dick as a variety man with a Les Dawson line in corny gags. Mendes ensures the three-hour show is couched in warm, comfortable nostalgia — especially thanks to the younger performers doing their Andrews Sisters-style song-and-dance routines. And yet, rob Howell’s dingy set is also a sullen edifice of mahogany, like a never-ending Penrose staircase, accessorised with a vast quantity of bric-a-brac — and a 1950s fitted kitchen on the B-side of a revolve. Theatrical trainspotters may hail it as a fusion of Butterworth’s early, Fifties- styled hit play, Mojo, and Mendes’s production of the jukebox drama The rise And Fall of Little Voice, which starred Jane Horrocks (both from the 1990s). But despite admiring the many attractions, I’m afraid that, ultimately, I couldn’t see the emotional wood for all the fascinating arboreal foliage.