Sitting in the vertiginous upper tiers of the Pinter Theatre in London’s West End certainly can evoke the hills of —if not California, then somewhere (maybe Lancashire?)— as you look down on Rob Howell’s strikingly multi-layered, sepia-washed set of the 'Sea View,' its interior glowing amber in the long, hot summer of 1976. The Webb family’s Blackpool guest house, presented on a revolving stage, benefits from an arrangement that ingeniously (and at one key moment, crucially) affords sight of its different levels and both the adult present-day and childhood past of Butterworth’s new work, directed with wit and poignancy by Sam Mendes.
One box is ticked suitably early: we’re going to get an array of brilliant performances from the cast, all intent on devouring Butterworth’s on-point dialogue. Storytelling genius is at work in these lines, as Jill (played by Helena Wilson), one of the four sisters who is still rooted there after all this time, recounts how the Sea View has churned its way through various changes of name over the years (Sea View; Sea View Guest House; Sea View Hotel; Sea View Hotel and Spa; and so on) before changing back —in the exact same order— to what it is now: the Sea View, from which you cannot see the sea at all. About thirty seconds of speech has conveyed a life’s worth of hopes, achievements, failings, and resolutions. It’s a coup that the script pulls off more than once, like the stormy arrival of Leanne Best’s Gloria, who sharply, even a touch viciously, warns her ostensibly genial and benign husband that he’d better not be about to “do your voices,” as he regards the Sea View’s “new-fangled” jukebox in the manner of a grand, slightly dotty professor. A couple of lines reach beyond a mere description of the preceding car journey to evoke an entire marriage.
The motifs of loss, disappearance, and absence, in the present, the past, and the impending future (the Webb matriarch is upstairs, dying) are accentuated by two characters in particular, both pointedly unseen in the sisters-as-adults acts. Joan now lives in America and despite Jill’s frantic —nay hysterical— insistences is by no means guaranteed to turn up at the deathbed. Mother Webb (name of Veronica) is a cipher in the current day but a domineering and effervescent force in the past, as the stage turns to show her drilling Joan, Gloria, Jill, and Ruby (played by a separate mini-cast in these scenes) with ruthless vigour into a teeth-and-jazz-hands singing act, as she pursues the goal of perfecting an ersatz Andrews Sisters. Both Veronica and the adult Joan are played with great verve by Laura Donnelly, who presents the latter as so trapped in her dream, albeit with good intentions, that she is unable to see that such groups have drifted irretrievably into un-hip territory and are a virtually impossible sell to showbiz agents. This blind spot is to have tragic consequences when a suspiciously domestic tryout in the Sea View’s kitchenette falls apart. (It was tough to watch the feet of the young Joan and those of a dubious American agent ascend the stairs for a ‘private audition,’ a scene which produced a horrified frisson of some magnitude in the audience.)
The Hills of California being for the most part busily paced, it does not share much in common with the output of its theatre’s namesake, but still there is something decidedly Pinteresque about the invisible yet much discussed figure of Joan, committed both to the distance of the past and to a foreign country. One even wonders whether, in a Beckettian move, she will fail to appear at all, but the moment finally comes: Afghan-coated, she steals into the unoccupied Sea View ground floor in the dead of night. Considering that most of the ‘now’ parts of the play have obsessed over her mooted arrival, it’s noticeable —perhaps inevitable— that the event marks a drop in energy. Maybe this anticlimax mirrors Jill’s gale-force wave of relief that her sibling has actually materialised. The sisters seem cowed, abruptly an audience themselves as Joan struts and performs her tall tales at them with an acquired set of Stateside manners. The script decrees that she will deploy a bombshell, which produces open mouths all round. In the seats, though, this revelation feels like a problem, a narrative fumble, as we hastily process exactly what we’re going to do with all the plot devices, moods, and themes in which we have invested for the past few hours. It’s quite a way down the road, so that the introduction of a new (and in all frankness, not very subtle) sub-story, in which the act then becomes mired, feels late and restless. For all that, it does produce a payoff, as Joan and her mother’s lives and decisions intertwine before our eyes in an unhappily fated replaying of history.
It’s hard not to mention Butterworth’s Jerusalem, of course, which has been widely lauded as one of the finest English plays ever conceived. Certainly it was "Jerusalem this" and "Jerusalem that" in the chattering hubbub prior to curtain-up and during the breaks of this matinee performance. Afterwards, while leaving, this was still the case, although it is unlikely (surely?) that the audience were expecting Jerusalem Part II. Even if some of them were, this was never going to be the deal. The Hills of California is enclosed, focused, and female-centric (the male characters are generally placed, figuratively and literally, off to the side), and it deliberates avoids any attempt at the sheer range or the encapsulation of the English predicament achieved in Butterworth’s famous work. Instead it gives us a story about family, its make-up of fallible human components, and the grief that always, in some form, comes home to roost. Sometimes, as in this case, this is the apportioning of blame: past events forever judged and re-judged in the present by an unreliable and partial jury. But the play is also about the unbreakable connections and shared memories, the lights in the dark. Butterworth knows that the theatre of family dynamics is one in which we all perform, and that this is a story that we are permanently hard-wired to receive.--Neil Jackson
