FringeReview UK 2024

The Hills of California

Sonia Friedman Productions and Neal Street Productions

Genre: Biographical Drama, Costume, Drama, Live Music, Mainstream Theatre, Theatre

Venue: Harold Pinter Theatre

Festival: FringeReview UK

Low Down

Review

Seven years since his multiple award-winning The Ferryman, and 15 since Jerusalem, Jez Butterworth’s The Hills of California arrives at the Harold Pinter Theatre directed by Sam Mendes till June 15^th. When Butterworth has written a chamber piece, like The River (2012) you realise one of his greatest strengths is the large-ensemble piece. And usually with a mythic state-of-nation backbeat.

So though it’s another large-cast, three-hour epic, The Hills of California is an interior one, not littered with political bodies but personal skeletons. Alternating between 1976 and 1956, it’s set in a Blackpool Guest House. Like The Ferryman, based on a disappearance of a member of his partner’s family, this play has roots in his own.

Far less Irish-Greek tragedy with its banshees hurtling to some cataclysm it spotlights the fortunes of ambitious single mother Veronica (Laura Donnelly, also Butterworth’s partner) and her four performing daughters, all drilled to dream – in 1956 – of Andrews-sisters fame. In 1976 they reunite uneasily round their dying mother.

Though set in three acts it’s basically five. We start though in August 1976 with off-stage Veronica terminally ill upstairs, opening out on Rob Howell’s outstanding revolve set, so gorgeous it becomes another character, lit moodily by Natasha Chivers. 1976 shows the detailed entrance hall, a vertiginous staircase ascending stage-left, and grubby chequered floor plonked with an old juke-box that finally, alarmingly works; and an old float. 1956 with the staircase reversed shows a smarter post-war kitchen, the same floor brighter.

Stay-at home youngest Jill (Helena Wilson) 32, is told by a nurse there’s options for end-of-life. Jill’s waiting for plane-delayed eldest sister Joan to return from the US. She needs Joan to complete a decision, but they’ve not seen each other for 20 years.  Bespectacled, consciously dowdy but radiant, Wilson here rivets with her quiet admissions, her non-life.

That resonates with panic-attack prone but glamorous sister Ruby (Olivia Lovibond), with whom Jill performs a nostalgic routine from their childhood.

They’re challenged in that by elder sister Gloria (Leanne Best) ordering “useless” Dennis (Bryan Dick) and her children around with a wise-cracking brio we later see descends from Veronica. Best in Gloria’s acetylene-blast of resentment moves beyond Joan to feelings of slight in her childhood, though it’s so glancing you might miss it.

Another husband Bill (Shaun Dooley) but it’s bumbling piano-tuner Mr Potts (Richard Lamsden) who proves shrewder than any of them.

Though almost lumbering in its Chekhovian register,1956 comes swiftly with the younger quartet giving outstanding performances, drilled by Donnelly’s Veronica, by turns commiserating and (mostly) stern. Eight female actors (of the four siblings) sing magnificently. Young Joan (Laura MacDonnell) who has most to do, Young Gloria (Nancy Allsop), Young Ruby (Sophia Ally), Young Jill (Nicola Turner). In Nick Powell’s composition, arranging and sound design, and with Ellen Kane’s choreography on a table-top, their Webb-Sisters routines are achingly good, and of course a decade out of fashion.

There’s two points where the play reaches stratospheric levels: the end of Act Two, Donnelly listening as MacDonnell performs in the offstage room. It’s spine-chilling then, and alter even more so. And the use of Mama Cass’s “Dream a little dream” where reunited, the four siblings riff on their present and the apst, and the one sister moves as the revolve turns back and – impossibly – their younger selves are performing Mama Cass in 1956. It’s a generous theatrical gesture to both singing quartets.

Lamsden, who as Mr Potts in 1976 proves far cannier about contemporary culture than his demeanour suggests, is well-meaning pianist Joe Fogg bulled by Veronica. There’s lodgers Mr Halliwell (Dooley again), Mr and Mrs Smith (Will Barratt, Georgina Hellier) ordered to go the long way round and never enter the kitchen. The latter two have barely five words to utter: an extraordinary production luxury. Dick returns as wisecracking local gig-fixer Jack Larkin, trying it on with Veronica. Who has eyes for big fish only.

Cue smooth, smart-talking and deadly Luther St John (Corey Johnson) setting in motion the way Joan leaves the continent and sets up divisions in the family. As the audience intuit, with the impresario looking on to the four pink-uniformed performers, America in 1956 has moved on.  He signed their admired Nat King Cole. But no-one’s heard of Elvis Presley. “What’s that?” asks Veronica.

Veronica’s prepared to diss one daughter, whom she thinks not up to par. But St John wants to hear just one: Joan. Against her mother’s wishes she begins the Cole “When I fall in love”. No: in a better acoustic. The Mississippi Room. Each room’s named for a State only one ever crosses to.

There’s a touch of Godot-Garbo to the Afghan-coated entrance of Joan (Donnelly again) sounding like Cher and with tales of pizza deliveries to the Andrews Sisters, LPs and a wildly different life. Hellier enjoys scene-stopping moments with Wilson; the play’s temperature now hovers around them, before powerful disruptions with sisters and the addition of a baby.

1976 nurse Penny and 1956 staff Biddy (Natasha Magigi) is like a mild version of Albee’s The Lady From Dubuque, easing death. There’s a relief in moments from Gloria’s children Patty (Lucy Moran) and Tony “not Anthony” (Alfie Jackson), Dr Rose (Steve Raine) brightly arriving via Penny at the end.

The Hills of California won’t cause the mild controversies or garner the acclaim of its predecessor. Bit it soars out of its level pain to rapt communions and song, made potent by grief. It’s in these moments, mainly around Wilson’s quiet patience, that others like Hellier and Lovibond can release feelings. Above all Best explodes with 20 years of resentment, pain and love.

It’s these small epiphanies that raise this work to near the dramatic level of the slick, precocious mojo, and theatrically beyond that and other Butterworth plays apart from those two masterpieces.  For nearly any other playwright, this would count as something of a masterpiece.

Published June 13, 2024June 14, 2024 by Simon Jenner