Jez Butterworth’s big success with his last two award-winning plays, Jerusalem and The Ferryman, means there is an adult audience ready and eager to fill a West End theatre to see his three-hour family drama of death and grief, finely acted and directed by Sam Mendez.
A huge wooden staircase, which reaches into the flies, dominates the set, a rundown Blackpool boarding house. In one of the bedrooms off-stage, a mother is dying of cancer. She has four adult daughters, three of them married. The unmarried one has stayed at home to look after her.
One of the daughters lives in America. The big question is will she come back to England? She hasn’t been home or in touch with the family since she was 15. (It was Oscar Wilde who said: ‘Children begin by loving their parents. After a time, they judge them. Rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.’)
The play rotates between adulthood in 1970s and childhood in the 1950s when their mother had coached them to be the next Andrews Sisters. The big scene is when the teenage girls audition for an American showbiz agent in their kitchen and their mother has to make a momentous and shocking decision.
The women dominate the play. The men are weaklings. The cast is headed by Laura Donnelly, excellent as the ambitious mum. She also plays the eldest daughter who has had a successful career in America. There are fine performances by Leanne Best as the abrasive, aggressive daughter and Helen Wilson as the sympathetic reclusive one.
The Hills of California is unnecessarily long and there are too many characters, some of whom could be cut with no loss. The messy ending also needs to be tidied up.
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