The Hills of California

(seen at the first preview performance on 27th January 2024)

In the endless heatwave summer of 1976, Jill (Helena Wilson) is the daughter who never left home, tending to her terminally ill mother with the help of a visiting nurse (Natasha Magigi).

Two married sisters – Ruby (Ophelia Lovibond) and Gloria (Leanne Best), Ruby’s husband Dennis (Bryan Dick) and Gloria’s Bill (Shaun Dooley), plus their children Tony (Alfie Jackson) and Patty (Lucy Moran) arrive to be with them, and like Godot, mystery sister Joan (Laura Donnelly) is awaited – delayed in transit from California.

There is more than a hint of Tennessee Williams about Jez Butterworth’s latest play. Strong women, a dysfunctional family dynamic, mental illness and waiting for death. Everything unspoken and the revelations are cruel when they arrive.

The only difference is a very British need for knockabout comedy, here supplied by Jack Larkin, typical Blackpool cabaret turn scraping a living with jokes probably first written as hieroglyphics. Bryan Dick still sells them well enough to raise a laugh, which turns out to feel almost macabre.

For we learn how the sisters’ mother too had ambitions of stardom for her offspring. One made the leap as greasy agent Luther St John (Cory Johnson masking nicely the sleaze) offers the world – at a price.

Butterworth blends the simple Andrews Sisters music and other popular performers of their era with complex emotional and philosophical questions. Whose narrative is the truth? How does life play out when a family each follows their own version as they diverge even further? 

He questions the foundations they grew from – where everything is broken down into factual questions with answers third hand, interpreted and filtered for optimism and even survival.

As siblings, Wilson, Lovibond and Best squabble, support and share the frustrations of womanhood. Wilson and Lovibond share a crazy moment which has the audience roaring, Best oozes disappointment as strongly as Wilson tries to mask hers. Each brings a different take on failure, even a different approach to dealing with it on the surface, but below the anger, reproach and blame are identical.

Late arriving Joan has Donnelly doing her best with some cliched material, in particular dealing with a few lines suggesting a re-write eliminated (rightly) one unnecessarily horrific idea.

Their younger selves, Nancy Alsop, Nicola Turner, Sophia Ally and Lara McDonnell get the best of Ellen Lane’s choreography, amusing and delighting – Allsop’s final unfinished stanza effective in Natasha Chivers last flourish of lighting design.

On Rob Howell’s impressive multi-level staircases, director Sam Mendes literally has the family navigating ups and downs, as their worlds turn. The pace seldom flags and each minor character adds as much to the mosaic as the sticky vinyl floor tiles they stand on.

Far less overt than either “Jerusalem” or “The Ferryman,” Butterworth is asking us to weigh larger questions internally, setting plenty of homework as the curtain falls. He has somewhat over-written, with surplus characters and scenes which evoke a little deja-vu from previous work, inserted to serve the same purpose. 

On the other hand, resisting the temptation of breaking the boundaries of reality more often than not, despite showing us exactly where he can, is impressive.

Remarkably staged and acted, and more than likely to develop considerably more depth as the run continues, it is as bracing as a walk along the prom and as full of bright lights and bleakness as the town in which it is set. The monkey will take that.