The Hills of California - Harold Pinter Theatre

Loved this and will see it again on Saturday. Maybe a bit long but the performances are all excellent.

Saw it yesterday and found it interesting. I found Gillian the most interesting character. Absolutely truthful and really quite resilient despite everything. However, an obvious codependent. Ruby was avoidant. Gloria almost too addicted to the negative energy, and the mother and Joan total fantasists. There was a lot there that could have been mined. Did they even have a father or did they all have different ones. There only seemed to be a year between each, or had he run off. Was Joan on drugs in the USA? How did she survive at 15? Was the mother really an alcoholic who ran in her knickers in the street . Who was the most accurate of those sisters. Gloria was supremely negative or was Gillian who was more measured. Ruby and Joan didn’t seem to have any opinions.

That was fast. Hopefully Sonia Friedman can transfer Stereophonic over here just as quickly.

I'd imagine Stereophonic would go to the Harold Pinter - a kind of swap! It's Sonia Friedman's go-to playhouse in the West End (Hills of California, Lyonesse, Dr Semmelweis, The Human Voice, and so on...) Plus, its capacity (796) is almost exactly the same as Stereophonic's current Broadway capacity (802 at the Golden.)

Excited to hear that The Hills of California will be on Broadway - I thought it was a truly wonderful, special show, even if it has been ignored by most over here. I can't see a world in which Laura Donnelly doesn't transfer with it - the others, I don't know.

Wonder if it's a pride thing for Jez Butterworth and Sonia Friedman or if the transfer was booked ages ago, it's not going anywhere near as successful as The Ferryman or The River.

The setting is quite specifically "British" in a way that Americans don't normally get to see, so that's a tough one to put across, but I think the Gypsy-like storyline of the stage mother and singing daughters will go down pretty well.

There is a sense that too many shows are opening in New York this season, and there just aren't the audiences to support them. There are many closings.

This. Sustaining a healthy 5-month run in a West End theatre, with a new play and no names (other than the writer and director) is pretty impressive still.

During the show I was thinking about how the plot could have gone in different directions... When Ruby's husband said he had seen someone at then end of the pier (which I assume is Joan), the twist could've been that Joan never made it to America and had been living out of sight in Blackpool the whole time, like the mad woman in the attic in Jane Eyre.

Another one was when Gloria goes up to visit mother whilst Joan and Gillian chat in the kitchen - I was convinced Gillian was going to smother and kill the mother so that Joan could never see her.

The idea of Joan leaving home but never making it to America actually would have worked a bit better I think. It did strike me as a bit jarring that this girl from a run down hotel in Blackpool was suddenly living it up in 60s Hollywood before her career burned out. Like two massively different cultures colliding in act 3. 

Jez Butterworth and Sam Mendes reunite to give us the world of 1956/76 in a Blackpool guest house.

It starts as three sisters arguing over what to do next and how they have been living in the shadow of their mothers ambition. Joan has escaped to America and having had some success, Jill has remained in the home looking after her mother, Gloria has become a bitter middle aged woman and Ruby is living her boring life in Rochdale. All 4 have been scarred by Veronica - the stage mother from hell.

Over the course of the first two acts we get scenes in 1976 as the daughters combine and then the second half of the two acts takes us back to 1956 and the girls chance to impress an American manager who is looking for an act for the London Palladium.

If you've ever seen All My Sons then this is essentially that but with a 1950 female singing troupe as the Macguffin instead of Plane parts. We start off thinking we know what has happened but the 1956 scenes reveal the truth as the onion like layers of the plot are peeled back to reveal that what we think happened didn't actually happen the way that way- Joan didn't split the act, the mother offered herself and then let her daughter (at 15) have sexual relations with the manager and wracked with guilt has become a shambling alcoholic who is dying offstage (only seen in the flashbacks). My reading was of the mother slumping into alcohol abuse because she knows she created a monster in Joan and not because of what she allowed to happen to her.

Gloria has become embittered because she overheard it all (the mother and manager coming to a decision, Joan willingly taking the chance to seduce an older man so she can escape her back street life) and was cast adrift by the actions. Jill loves looking after her mother and is a 32 year old virgin.

Gloria is fuming at Joan not being there as the mother is close to death, Jill and Ruby are sure that Joan will arrive.

So far so setup and then we get the third act.

In the end Joan arrives and the truth will out. And here we have Laura Donnelly (playing the mother in the flashbacks) giving us her dreadful American accent as the prodigal returns but bizarrely it fits into the character. Joan is nothing but a narcissistic loser who moves from one job to the next and from one man to the next. Her career fizzled out long ago and the dreams her two sisters had about her life and career are shown to be a sham. Joan got what she wanted in 1956 - she moved out of Blackpool and didn't care who she stomped on or slept with to do it.

Things come to a head as Jill and Joan collide over the decision Joan makes not to see the mother before she dies.

Helena Wilson knocks it out of the park as Jill - happy to be a carer and happy to have the memory of childhood performing. The mousy forgotten one that hasn't managed to escape to Rochdale or California but who is still happy with her lot. Nicola Turner as the young Jill in the 1956 flashbacks also looks uncannily like her. Its just a shame that we've got a couple of minor characters too many as the younger versions of the girls could do with some more fleshing out to highlight the traits that lead them to the '76 versions. Donnelly is saddled with the fake accent from hell although I'm saying its deliberate in an attempt to show us that Joan for all her fancy living claims is still acting the part to get what she wants.

We discover Ruby is actually happy in her life.

and in the end the person who comes out a winner in it all is Jill, Joan has come back to dump her new baby on the family so she can tour with the Stones (or some such). It'll only be for a month or two but everyone knows that Joan isn't ever coming back so Jill in one night loses her mother but gains a child. Giving her someone else to care for going forward - its that tired old trope you see in the likes of Eastenders or Corrie all the time. Someone must die the same day a baby is born.

Joan walks out as they coo over the baby. She's shallow, facile, horrible, a user. The sisters who idolised her are happy to let her go - she has served her purpose by giving them a new one.

Its certainly an interesting choice from where we've started at - the winner is the one that the rest see as a loser and the one that the other sisters had stomped all over their ambitions turns out to be the biggest loser of them all. A horrible person willing to sacrifice her relationship with her own child for a probably non-existent gig.

Anyway its all about times changing and how people adapt - Veronica can't see that her ambitions are not what all the girls want and that the act she is getting them to do is years out of date, she can't adapt and so must die so that her daughters can finally come to terms with their past and move on. Joan has adapted before the play starts, she is the rebel with a cause, but over time can't adapt in a different way to changing times - 20 years later she's still acting as the rebellious teenager and wholly unable to see how she is now as out of step with 1976 as her mother was with 1956.

Sam Mendes is relying on the stage revolving to symbolise where we are both geographically and time wise. And I also think he could have tightened this up both plot and cast wise. The plotting sees a couple of children appear for essentially a scene and a half and then vanish from the story -they are there to tell us that Gloria doesn't obey the rules but aside from that they offer nothing storywise and could easily be kept off stage for the entire runtime (it hit me later that the daughter was clearly there to be an understudy for the 1956 girls). Then before the end we have Shaun Dooley as Bill (Mr Gloria) tell us about the mysterious women he's just met on the North Pier. Now it seemed clear that its supposed to be Joan and there will be a big reveal any minute now......but it never comes, its just a rambling story about a woman on the pier and I was left scratching my head.

You could put that down to Butterworth seemingly being destined to write something that again runs for 3 hours - as the layers of the onion are peeled off and the mysteries etc are solved its very engaging and well put together but its overstaffed on stage. There is a lot going on between 1956 and 1976 that we never get to see but which is relayed in such a fashion to make us fill in the blanks in our own minds. Once we find out what Veronica has done in Act 2 it becomes clear why the guest house and herself have become rundown over the last two decades.

Personally I found Jerusalem to be a tad boring and The Ferryman to be a masterpiece and this falls somewhere in the middle. The three hours flew by but it needs an outsider to take a look at the material and excise the flab.

I'm not sure how much the New York crowd will embrace a 3 hour play based in a rundown Blackpool guest house though.