*This house. It’s called ‘Sea View’. It’s just I’ve looked out of every window, and you can’t. You can’t see the sea.*
Blackpool, 1976. The driest summer in 200 years. The beaches are packed. The hotels are heaving. In the sweltering backstreets, far from the choc ices and donkey rides, the Webb Sisters are returning to their mother's run-down guest house, as she lies dying upstairs.
Following their multi award-winning triumph *The Ferryman*, Jez Butterworth, writer of *Jerusalem*, resumes his partnership with Sam Mendes, director of *The Lehman Trilogy*, to bring you The Hills of California.
__*The Hills of California* plays at Harold Pinter Theatre from 27 January 2024 for a strictly limited season.__
Like Beth Steel’s terrific Till the Stars Come Down, which has just opened at London’s National Theatre, Butterworth’s piece is an elegiac, female-led family drama. Set in Blackpool during the 1976 heatwave, it’s beautifully layered. Days, nights and decades ebb and flow like the waves licking the gaudy Pleasure Beach, as the Webb sisters revisit the starry-eyed showbiz might-have-beens of their childhood – aspirations nurtured by their ambitious mother, who is now dying. In a pitch-perfect production from Sam Mendes, it is devastatingly moving, bitterly funny, tender, cruel and wise: a piercing reminder that all the paths we choose lead ultimately in only one direction – and time, like life, is short.
There are lovely bits nonetheless including effervescent verbal riffs and snatches of song, although sentimentality and nostalgia soften the edges. Butterworth is reaching for the epic and there is a characteristic daring in that ambition but Rob Howell’s gorgeous set, dominated by a beautiful staircase, has heights and depths that the play itself does not reach.
2024 | West End |
West End |
2024 | Broadway |
Original Broadway Production Broadway |
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