The Hills of California Reviews Round-up

"Five stars for The Hills of California, a magnificent new play from Jez Butterworth"

"Past and present, trauma and music combine in this simmering drama at the Harold Pinter Theatre, London"

"“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."

"As with Butterworth’s Jerusalem and The Ferryman, the play crackles with terrific, sharp humour... The playwright catches again the quality of a time and place and its significance as metaphor"

"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"

"Devastatingly moving, bitterly funny, tender, cruel and wise"

"Jez Butterworth’s new Blackpool-set family drama is a multilayered, melancholy mingling of memories, music and dreams, beautifully directed by Sam Mendes"

"In this exquisite new play from Jez Butterworth – his first since 2017’s The Ferryman – songs are a place to dream and to escape to: little three-minute miracles offering a glimmer of an elusive, idealised existence beyond life’s mundane realities."

"Wittily choreographed by Ellen Kane, the song-and-dance routines that Donnelly’s Veronica drills into the women’s younger counterparts (Nancy Allsop, Nicola Turner, Sophia Ally and Lara McDonnell, all superb) are pure joy."

"The final-act revelations bring the play around in an imperfect circle that feels both epic and existential in its resonance. Yet the strain of melancholy here is countered by so much that is warm, and funny, and true, underscored by a love of popular music and the way it anchors us to moments in our lives."

"Laura Donnelly shines in Jez Butterworth’s bold MeToo drama"

"A fine female cast powers this smart new play by Jez Butterworth about abuse, estrangement and mortality"

"Death is no stranger to Butterworth’s plays. But the mortality here is very close to home, and what’s being addressed is the fundamental stuff; how do we face the loss of someone very close to us, who has damaged us?"

"Though it’s a commendably female-dominated evening (Ruby and Gloria’s husbands are derisory, ancillary figures), a shaming light is shone on predatory and presumptuous male behaviour in both eras."

"Of more pressing, prosaic concern for me was that the evening, running to almost three hours, just needs a trim and a less languid pace."

"It’s smart, ambitious fare, no question, the cast serve it with aplomb, and the final half-hour works like a dream. But, even so, it’s an uphill slog to get there, and we’re some distance from the hallowed triumph of Jerusalem."

"‘Jerusalem’ playwright Jez Butterworth returns with a remarkable play about a divided family of women"

"Jez Butterworth’s first play in seven years unfurls with the richness and depth of a well-crafted novel."

"Without wishing to get into spoiler territory, it’s a drama about the pain and joy and complicatedness of family, that centres on the gradually unfurling, never unambiguously resolved mystery of what precisely went down between Veronica and the younger Joan."

"Butterworth writes – and Mendes directs – with a deft, novelistic fluidity, as the story flits from one period to another. Tangents are taken. New characters are woven in at daringly late junctures. It’s increasingly dense and charged. Butterworth for the most part writes the Webbs wonderfully: smart, tough, vulnerable women left in different shades of disarray over a childhood dream that never came to be. They feel like tangible, real beings"

"The performances are uniformly tremendous, notably Lovibond’s quicksilver Ruby and Best’s pained, angry Gloria... What makes the show, though, is Donnelly."

"After an astonishing entrance scene, Donnelly’s otherworldly presence as Joan electrifies a show that palpably builds in power and ambition as it goes."

"Unfortunately, Butterworth fumbles the plot a little at the end. While his female characters are wonderful, what actually happens to them can feel cliche-bound"

"... Butterworth remains a one-off, a man who can write plays about ordinary people that carry the charge of the great tragedies."

"Jez Butterworth’s drama is rich but unconvincing"

"This family story has its flaws, but the West End is better for its presence"

"Butterworth’s writing is resonant but proceeds at far too languid a pace. Mendes would have done well to have trimmed the three-hour running time, especially given that much is withheld for too long, until a fiery tumble of revelations in the final half hour."

"Donnelly is magnificent as Veronica, a strict single mother with intriguing moral grey areas, who runs the Sea View like a cross between a detention facility and Butlin’s. She blazes throughout, while Wilson, an actress I have long admired, simmers beautifully, suggesting all of the possibly agoraphobic Jill’s love, loyalty and stunted life chances."

"Despite the play’s flaws, the West End is infinitely the richer for its presence."

"Dreams of fame trap and inspire in Jez Butterworth’s female-centred, Blackpool-set new play"

"Butterworth is ingenious about the way fantasy traps and inspires."

"The dream of stage success is an illusion, which leads to the drama’s main secret and shock, yet the harmonies are real and implant enduring memories: songs are beautifully envisaged as places in which to dwell and hide."

"Sam Mendes’s production is motored by fine acting from Leanne Best (ravaging hectically), Ophelia Lovibond and Helena Wilson, and by a gleaming central performance from Laura Donnelly, who manages to be apparently all-too-obvious and yet ultimately mysterious"

"The evening unfolds gradually – the opening scene could do with some of the musical zip that comes later; its pleasures come not from surprises of form or linguistic intensity, but from unexpected observations, social excavation."

"Jez Butterworth's new play is consistently surprising"

"Along with the playwright’s earlier works Jerusalem and The Ferryman, this rounds out a trio of flawed masterpieces"

"The latest collaboration between writer Jez Butterworth and director Sam Mendes is a strange and enthralling female-centred family saga set in Blackpool, in 1958, and in the swelteringly hot summer of 1976. It’s packed with warmth, hurt and rich texture, and also with a fascination for eras the two fifty-something men will have known slightly or not at all. A rivetingly assertive central performance from Laura Donnelly sets the tone for a strong ensemble cast and the play more than earns its three-hour running time, at least until the garbled ending. Mendes told me last year Butterworth originally handed him “half a play”. It’s now nine-tenths of a superb one."

"Donnelly’s is a sublime, physically exact performance of a woman who keeps everything under tight control, even her own sensuality, to avert collapse."

"At heart, this is a witty, closely observed study of family relations and of the cycle of birth and death, impeccably performed by both young and older cast members and expertly conducted by Mendes: even the singing is impressive."

"Four sisters soar in new Jez Butterworth play"

"The Hills of California is definitely epic (it runs for a swift three hours) and ambitious. But it doesn’t yet ignite in the way Jerusalem did. It’s a slow smoulder rather than a fierce blaze, shooting off thought-provoking sparks without ever fully illuminating its themes. I had the odd sense of the playwright standing outside his creation, straining every sinew to make it come to life, willing it to succeed."

"Donnelly, Butterworth’s long-term collaborator and partner, gives a varied turn of immense detail, conveying both hyper-activity and disaffected languor with careful attention. There’s tension in the unsaid as well as the said, marked by Sam Mendes’s statuesque direction that often puts the sisters on opposite sides of the stage, creating distance between them."

"Jez Butterworth’s fractious family of singing sisters"

"The Jerusalem playwright’s new drama, directed by Sam Mendes, follows four siblings coached as children to become stars and now reunited at their mother’s bedside"

"... sibling grief is clear in the sisters’ fighting and apportioning guilt or blame. It is in these moments that the play feels most alive. Butterworth refreshingly centres female lives but overall it is an uneven drama, baggy in its pacing."

"When these characters fight, they come to pained life, but more often they are too flat."

"We do not get a larger sense of her power because an overbearing plot – involving child sexual abuse and a surprise baby – takes over, flattening out the emotional depths that might have been drawn from grief, forgiveness, redemption and life’s failures for these unforgivingly disappointed women."

"There are lovely bits nonetheless including effervescent verbal riffs and snatches of song, although sentimentality and nostalgia soften the edges."

"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"

"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."

"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"

"... 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."

"The Hills of California is a massive three-act play that gestures repeatedly but ultimately fruitlessly towards America"

"Jez Butterworth’s new play falters at the end"

"What a frustrating evening. Jez Butterworth’s eagerly awaited new drama comes tantalisingly close to sweeping us off our feet: Laura Donnelly’s hypnotic central performance as Veronica, matriarch of a Blackpool guesthouse, will certainly linger in the memory. Yet in the end, the director Sam Mendes hasn’t been able to impose enough discipline on Butterworth’s penchant for baggy, poetic speeches."

"The haughty, single-minded Veronica is a monstrous creation, a cross between Gypsy’s Mama Rose and Miss Jean Brodie. Butterworth allows us a glimpse of the fragilities beneath the iron exterior. Donnelly is utterly compelling"

"Men, it has to be said, don’t emerge well from this script: all are lechers or hopeless bores. But to what extent is Veronica culpable for what happens to her girls? Rather than allow us to dwell on that question, Butterworth appends a muddled and wildly implausible final act"

"Does Jez Butterworth’s new play match his masterpiece Jerusalem?"

"The Hills of California is our leading playwright’s first work to be dominated by women — and Laura Donnelly owns the stage as a Blackpool landlady"

"Jez Butterworth’s plays all feature bullshitters, prevaricators, plunge-takers and survivors. Sometimes, as in his masterpiece Jerusalem, he packs all these warring traits into one livewire central turn. The Hills of California, his first play in seven years and his first to be dominated by women, spreads the load more evenly."

"It is an ensemble play, a collection of aftershocks more than a controlled dramatic explosion. Yes, even when boasting a performance as grabbing as Laura Donnelly’s twin roles as a formidable showbiz matriarch and her damaged daughter."

"The play, as is Butterworth’s wont, is three acts and almost three hours long. It’s studded with good lines, fine performances, resonances, echoes and a lingering sense of loss. It’s intelligent. It’s witty. And yet I’d call it an interesting play rather than a great one: a collection of sparks that only fitfully catch fire."

"You can argue that it’s a play about those left behind picking up the pieces; that its bittiness is strategic. Maybe so. I enjoyed The Hills of California, but I left it feeling like I had seen a series of glorious cameos rather than a glorious play."