A play full of turns: emotional, musical, theatrical
MARIA MARGARONIS
THE HILLS OF CALIFORNIA JEZ BUTTERWORTH
Harold Pinter Theatre, London, until June 15
THE 1970S IN BRITAIN were a Janus decade, looking back to the vibrant 1960s and the postwar world, and forward to the capitalist transformation of the Thatcher years. Jez Butterworth’s new play, set in the broiling summer of 1976, is also Janus-faced, poised on a sharpened knife edge between parody and poignancy, black comedy and tragedy, delusion and dream. It’s as if he has challenged himself (and us) to a game of theatrical chicken, testing how long we can balance there without touching the ground.
We are in the backstreets of Blackpool, in the Seaview guesthouse, which has a tiki bar and a jukebox, but no view of the sea, even from “Alaska”, on the top floor: all the rooms are named for American states. A dark double-helix staircase winds like an Escher drawing all the way up to the flies, punctuated by doorways with identical red-shaded lamps. Rob Howell’s set says retro murder-mystery or farce; Nick Powell’s sound design mixes the tense plink-plink of a piano being tuned with the cheerful music of an ice-cream van. The mood is twisted Hitchcock in the skewed key of Twin Peaks.
Seaview is obviously in terminal decline, like its proprietor, who lies dying upstairs: Mother, the magnet who still shapes her daughters’ lives. The play’s setup is classic, almost a cliché. Jill, the mousy stay-at-home daughter, has summoned her three sisters to the matriarch’s deathbed: sparky Ruby, resentful Gloria and Joan, their mother’s favourite, the one who got away. Will Joan arrive, a Pinteresque guest, before the others agree to call in the men with the morphine – Drs Gross, Onions and Rose – to put Mother out of her misery? What skeletons will tumble out of those closed doors upstairs?
Butterworth’s previous play, The Ferryman, was criticized for trading on Irish stereotypes, from the endless drinking and quarrelling to the old aunt away with the fairies and gifted with second sight. The opening scene of The Hills of California made me worry that we were in for something similar with the North: bickering, nostalgia, chippiness and smutty jokes. Central casting has been busy: there’s Penny the warm West Indian nurse (Natasha Magigi), Mr Potts the garrulous piano tuner (Richard Lumsden), who has a fine line in innuendo (“A piano must be played”), and Gloria’s husband, Bill (Shaun Dooley), who speaks in bluff euphemisms: “major ding-dong”, “wacky baccy”, “sew your knickers to your vest or you’ll come to a sticky end”. The sisters whirl at speed through a repertoire of reminiscence, envy, laughter, panic and tears, humanized by Ophelia Lovibond as Ruby, Leanne Best as Gloria (in fabulous coppereffect plat
