Ruth Leon recommends.. The Hills of California

Pocket theatre review

The Hills of California – Harold Pinter Theatre

Jez Butterworth’s new play, The Hills of California, in a dazzling production by Sam Mendes, is reminiscent of several other plays. It has elements of The Homecoming in which a long absent family member returns to the fold with alarming consequences, but it is also redolent of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, in which a brisk female character attempts to mould her charges in her own image.

An excellent Laura Donnelly gives us a central performance that owes much to Gypsy’s Mama Rose, a mother who tries to embue her daughters with her own stunted ambitions. There’s even a hint of Waiting For Godot in the anticipation of a long absent central character.

The story begins in Blackpool, 1956, where Mrs Webb is determined to get her four daughters out of the stultifying life of a decaying seaside resort and into the London Palladium as an Andrews Sisters tribute act.

20 years later, The Hills of California treads a familiar dramatic path with the gathering of a dysfunctional family at the dying of its matriarch. It’s 1976, the hottest summer in 200 years. The beaches are packed. The hotels are heaving, even Mrs Webb’s rundown guesthouse is full, and in the sweltering backstreets, far from the choc ices and donkey rides, the sisters are returning to their mother’s house, as she lies dying upstairs. All but Joan, the favourite. Where is Joan? On her way back to Blackpool from her California home to bid farewell to their mother? Perhaps.

The Hills of California, as you might expect from the author of Jerusalem, is an immensely complex and multi-dimenstional story in three acts, with a huge cast, effectively wrangled by Mendes. It takes place in the past and the present, with both the adult sisters and their child counterparts enacting the sometimes surreal, sometimes tragic and sometimes very funny interactions of a family who have known one another forever but, it turns out, not very well.

The entire cast is strong with Butterworth, Mendes and their actors clearly delineating each character so that each has her separate claim on our attention and sympathy. But the highest plaudits must go to Laura Donnelly’s finely detailed and pitch-perfect Mrs Webb who has to make a maternal choice so shocking that it reminded me of Sophie’s Choice, far more consequential than Mama Rose telling Gypsy Rose Lee that it’s okay to become a stripper.

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