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“Salt. Damp. Neglect. Plus time,” says the piano tuner, shaking his head over a recalcitrant instrument early on in Jez Butterworth’s magnificent, moving and quietly furious new play. “If I’ve said it once, a piano must be played.”
He could be speaking of just about any of the characters too in this rich, funny, brilliantly layered drama about lost dreams, trampled hopes, parenting and letting go. Or indeed of the place itself. It’s a piece that splices the delicate texture of a memory play like Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa with a bleak truth about abuse and wraps it in a sad story simmering with love, rage and loss.
The Hills of California opens in Blackpool in 1976, that endless sweltering summer when the tarmac melted and there were standpipes in the street. Shops have closed down, the seaside resort’s fortunes have slid; the Seaview guesthouse, which once styled itself as a “luxury” abode, looks cluttered and forlorn.
In the empty “public parlour”, three sisters — Gloria, Jill and Ruby — gather as their mother lies dying in a bedroom upstairs, all three caught up in that strange liminal space between life and death, when lack of sleep, dark humour and ragged grief compete for supremacy and memories can feel as vivid and substantial as the room.
Here one memory in particular nags like a broken tooth: a watershed moment 20 years earlier when something slipped in the futures that their mother, Veronica, hoped to carve out for them, leaving them beached in disappointment — all except for Joan, the oldest sister, the one who got away. Or so it seems.
We’re pitched back with them to relive it. Suddenly the house is full of people, the kitchen busy. Veronica, brisk in her neat cardigan and circle skirt, is fielding guests, hot pans and pushy men, all the while drilling her girls into the Andrews Sisters-style girl group she hopes will magic them out of Blackpool and into the Hollywood dream.
The awful truth is that Veronica is out of step. Elvis is in the wings: she’s training up her girls for a future that’s already gone. And the dream she is chasing is a toxic one. When a predatory producer arrives to check them out, we see the terrible moment that rips childhood from Joan and tears the heart out of the family.
As with Butterworth’s Jerusalem and The Ferryman, the play crackles with terrific, sharp humour (“That woman gets good use out of a chair”). The playwright catches again the quality of a time and place and its significance as metaphor: the boarding house feels emblematic of 1970s industrial decline. But what makes his plays is something more elusive: an ability to bend and stretch time, to show how the past can inhabit the present, how the myths we inherit and those we invent shape our experience of reality. The journey for the women here is towards the awful truth of what happened that night.
Sam Mendes’ beautifully paced production surfs time, place and mood and is gloriously acted. Veronica is a superb character, brilliantly, painfully played here by Laura Donnelly: a woman of iron resolve, who mistakenly hammers care for her girls into misplaced ambition and, ultimately, monstrous damage. There are wonderful, funny and moving performances too from Leanne Best as the raging, embittered Gloria, Helena Wilson as repressed Jill and Ophelia Lovibond as Ruby, wearing sarcasm as a shield. Byan Dick is hugely enjoyable as two of the many hapless men in the story, grappling with their own shredded hopes.
And in a sense, that piano is another character. Music swirls through the piece, as escape, solace and, finally, as a place of defiance and solidarity for the four sisters as they find some sort of way to take hold of this stage and let go of the past.
★★★★★
To June 15, hillsofcaliforniaplay.com
