The Hills of California review: A sweet return from Jez Butterworth – but it’s no Jerusalem

The world of this play is an intriguing and satisfying place to spend three hours. There are fine performances, sweet harmonies, and buckets of retro atmosphere. But is there gold in them thar hills? Not this time, alas

Laura Donnelly stars in ‘The Hills of California’ as showbiz matriarch Veronica Webb (Mark Douet)

After his brilliant, era-defining 2009 play Jerusalem, a new Jez Butterworth play is a big deal: you can be sure of a sizeable budget, hefty running time, sprawling cast, and most of all, massive emotions sploshing messily across the stage. And if Butterworth’s latest doesn’t rival 2017’s Olivier Award-winning Irish epic The Ferryman in pace or power, it’s still a satisfyingly substantial look at four sisters making sense of their childhood as their mother lies dying upstairs.

Facts and dates are often slippery in this story but the setting starts out clear enough. We’re in a guest house in 1976 Blackpool, as the heat of England’s Great Drought moistens brows and ignites tempers. Matriarch Veronica has misleadingly called this place “Sea View” – even though its backstreet location is more appealing to covert adulterers than wholesome holidaymakers. The same compulsion to fantasise her way to a more beautiful life makes her tell her four daughters that her dad died heroically in the war (exact circumstances vary) as she marshals them into an Andrews Sisters-style close harmony vocal group. There are shades of archetypal stage mother Mama Rose from Gypsy (1959) in this play’s flashback scenes, set sometime in the 1950s: Laura Donnelly makes a compellingly brittle, silver-tongued Veronica as she channels everything at her disposal to turn these stubbornly ordinary girls into stars.

Director Sam Mendes’s production brings out all the gentle humour in Butterworth’s play: some of the 1950s scenes feel like lost outtakes from a mid-century sitcom, as Veronica effortfully clings to a hotelier’s respectability in the face of bottom-pinching, pun-peddling rogues like Mr Halliwell (Shaun Dooley). The saucy jokes sail above the heads of most of her children but not older, worldlier Joan (Lara McDonnell), who internalises her mother’s sense that her body is just another tool to be used on the path to stardom.

Fast-forward to 1976 and Joan has escaped to the titular heights of California while her three sisters fuss and fret over their dying mother. Her absence weighs heavily on the family in this play’s first two acts: her dutiful, neurotic sister Jill (Helena Wilson) waits for her, Ruby (Ophelia Lovibond) idolises her, Gloria (Leanne Best) resents her and Veronica sees her as her last chance of absolution from her decades-old maternal failings.

But the eventual third-act resolution of Joan’s story doesn’t do justice to the careful set-up. There are thorny questions around consent and blame that Butterworth sidesteps in favour of easier moral territory, slipping into a saccharine, overly familiar-feeling ending. It’s not the only big theme he fumbles here. Jerusalem is a massive three-act play that wrestles with English identity, in both its folk legends and brutal realities. The Hills of California is a massive three-act play that gestures repeatedly but ultimately fruitlessly towards America, like a shipwrecked sailor in a dinghy failing to flag down a vast ocean liner. Butterworth clearly loves the Andrews Sisters but although the play is laden with facts about their hardscrabble journey to stardom, there’s little insight into the hold their distinct brand of Americana has over this family, or into the mythos and magic of distant Hollywood.

Nicola Turner, Nancy Allsop, Lara McDonnell and Sophia Ally in ‘The Hills of California’ (Mark Douet)

This lack of an intellectual underpinning feels more visible in a play that lacks the pace and tautness of Butterworth’s writing at its best: here, emotions are as likely to be resolved in a sentimental old song as in an explosive conflict. The world of this play is an intriguing place to spend three hours, with fine performances, sweet harmonies, and buckets of retro atmosphere. But is there gold in them thar hills? Not this time, alas.

‘The Hills of California’ is at the Harold Pinter Theatre until 15 June