Singing sisters who can’t live in harmony
The Hills Of California
Harold Pinter Theatre, London
Until June 15, 3hrs
★★★★★
Till The Stars Come Down
Dorfman Theatre, London
Until March 16, 2hrs 30mins
★★★★★
The playwright Jez Butterworth wrote Jerusalem – perhaps the best play of the century. It was set in the rural badlands of Wiltshire. This new one, The Hills Of California, also directed by Sam Mendes, is located in a sweltering Blackpool boarding house during the heatwave of 1976. The place is called Sea View, though it doesn’t have one. Rob Howell’s fabulous, vertical set is a gloomy jungle of mahogany banisters.
Upstairs, unseen, an old woman is dying of cancer. She is groaning like ‘a bayoneted German’ (Butterworth’s fabulous dialogue takes no prisoners). Downstairs, her grown-up daughters (a fractious bunch brilliantly played by Helena Wilson, Ophelia Lovibond and Leanne Best) are arriving to say farewell, all waiting for their long-lost sister Joan to turn up from California before the GP can release their mum from her agony with a benign morphine overdose (those were the days).
In flashbacks the sisters become schoolgirls and we see their super-strict mother, Veronica, in her prime – bracingly played by Laura Donnelly – and determined that her girls will become the next Andrews Sisters. It’s work, work, work. The close-harmony singing is a joy from this troupe of well-drilled youngsters, making the show almost a musical.
When a visiting hot-shot American agent (a sinister Corey Johnson) comes to see the girls sing, their mother makes a choice so brutal you freeze in horror.
Shakespeare’s line ‘Thou met’st with things dying, I with things new-born’ seems to have inspired the final plot twist when Joan, now a hippy chick, turns up from California with a secret. It’s a play of beauty, heat and pain, all built on a shattered dream. Mendes coaxes top work from a fine, largely female cast. A long play, for sure, but the time whooshes by.
Till The Stars Come Down is about sisters at a wedding in Nottinghamshire. Expect sausage rolls, lager, a cheese hedgehog and a glitter ball. The banter is hilarious as three generations of women neck Buck’s fizz and crumpets while preparing for the bride Sylvia’s big day.
Beth Steel’s unpatronising play – a red-wall, working-class affair – is a priceless mine of one-liners (a hot tub is ‘a sex pond’). The sisters – Lucy Black (Hazel) and Lisa McGrillis (Maggie), with Sinéad Matthews memorable as the bride Sylvia – are terrific. And Lorraine Ashbourne’s gobby Aunty Carol is worth the ticket price alone.
Bijan Sheibani’s production is full of laughter, sex, marital showdowns and an emotional clout you seldom get in posher dramas. The play makes these struggling women heroic. They’ve worked out that the best antidote to a life of troubles is to dance till you drop. A cracking evening, very funny and wholly recommended.