I’m a bit late when it comes to admiring the work of Jez Butterworth. But after seeing The Ferryman in 2019, the first of his plays I’d ever seen staged, I vowed not to miss whatever came next. (I saw the mostly American replacement cast a month or so after the show won the Tony Award for Best Play, and the show blew me away, even with some not-so-great fake Irish accents in the mix.) So as soon as The Hills of California was announced, I knew I had to see it. We got tickets for what I didn’t realize at the time was the final preview performance, September 28th. The show officially opened the next night. You won’t be surprised to hear that it blew me away.
The Hills of California is set in a family-owned hotel/rooming house in Blackpool, England in 1976, where the estranged Webb sisters are reuniting in their childhood home upon the impending death of their mother. Well, three of them are. Jill has apparently never moved out and been their ailing mother’s caregiver for quite some time. Youngest sister Ruby shows up with her husband Dennis, followed shortly by third sister Gloria with her husband and offspring – but only Jill is convinced that oldest sister Joan will bother to come from America. The play explores, through scenes set in 1976 as well as flashbacks set twenty years earlier, what drove these sisters apart; they were extremely close as kids, with each other and with their single mother Veronica despite her taskmaster-like method of bringing them together as a four-member version of the Andrews Sisters and conflicting stories about what happened to their father. There’s a lot of great four-part harmony singing in the flashbacks; not so much in the 1976 scenes.
As my friend Dave said: “It’s a Jez Butterworth drama. You know from the beginning something bad is coming. It’s just a matter of when it happens and what the fallout is.”
I’m a big fan of stories that alternate present and past to build tension, and Butterworth manages it expertly here, with just enough time spent in each time frame before a switch occurs to move the action forward and reveal something about how each sister has changed, progressing inexorably towards the reveal of the bad thing that happened (which I won’t spoil here) and clarifying what we already know of the fallout in the characters’ present.
As adults, Helena Wilson’s Jill is the people-pleaser, Ophelia Lovibond’s Ruby the most naïve, and Leanne Best’s Gloria the inexplicably bitter one. Each actress was fantastic, and the distance between their character played perfectly. The scenes where they try to confront that distance, without truly getting to the heart of what pushed them apart, were tension-packed and at points heart-breaking. Equally heart-breaking was watching the scenes with their much more joyful, playful, bonded younger selves (Nancy Allsop as Young Gloria, Nicola Turner as Young Jill, Sophia Ally as Young Ruby, and Lara Donnell as Young Joan), knowing where those relationships are headed. Sam Mendes clearly had the younger and older actresses spend time together perfecting matching body language and facial expressions; there was no doubt from the moment the younger versions stepped on stage who was who. The younger actresses are also all wonderful singers, it should be noted.
If there’s a core character the play revolves around (which even in ensemble shows like this there usually is), it’s mother Veronica in the flashbacks. Lara Donnelly was a tour-de-force in the role. Veronica is a strict “stage mother” but also fiercely protective of her daughters, and there are moments when the fight between ambition and protectiveness threatens to overwhelm her. Donnelly’s swings from one to the other, and the internal conflicts that result, were impressive. Donnelly also plays the adult Joan in the play’s final act, and I can honestly say I didn’t realize it was the same actress (obviously, I didn’t read the full cast list in the Playbill before the show, nor did I really pay attention when the adult sisters comment on how much like Mother Joan was…).
If I have any complaint about the show, it’s that Ruby’s husband Dennis (Bryan Dick), and Gloria’s husband Bill (Richard Short) and kids Tony and Patty (Liam Bixby and Nancy Allsop) seem truly extraneous in the 1976 scenes and don’t really add to any understanding of how the sisters are different as adults (particularly the two children, who are in one scene together), whereas the other adults in the flashback scenes (especially Richard Lumsden’s Joe Fogg, Bryan Dick’s Jack Larkin, and David Wilson Barnes’ very skeevy Luther St. John) add to our understanding of Veronica and how far she’ll go to both promote and protect her daughters.
Kudos also must be given to designer Rob Howell and lighting designer Natasha Chivers for creating a set that feels cavernous and claustrophobic at the same time, reflecting the sisters’ closeness and division. Director Sam Mendes uses the rotating stage to move between the present and the past, which further illustrates how the sisters’ relationship has changed: in the past, they are always gathered around the kitchen table, where boarders/guests are not allowed; in the present, they only interact in the hotel’s lobby/common room, as though they are all guests/visitors in what used to be their home.
The Hills of California closed on Broadway in December. I am sure it will be nominated for several Tony Awards this season.
I’ve always loved live theater, and in the past couple of years I’ve been making a stronger effort to see more of it. Theater Thursday is a new occasional series where I talk about live theater, both shows I’ve seen recently and shows I’ve loved in the past.
