Jez Butterworth’s cunning and compelling The Hills of California takes its title from Johnny Mercer’s buoyant jingle about the good life. Snatches of this bromidic Kool-Aid are sung during the course of the evening, including one couplet that casts a particularly cold light on the small tragedies of the Webb family being acted out onstage: “The hills of California will give you a start / I guess I better warn ya, cause you’ll lose your heart.” Just how that heart gets lost is what Butterworth charts in this well-written, intricately drawn map of denial.
Here, in a backwater Blackpool guesthouse in 1976, on the hottest day in England since 1864, everything on Rob Howell’s weathered set seems to be on the verge of collapse—the clapped-out piano, the broken jukebox, and, crucially, the family matriarch, Veronica (Laura Donnelly), who lies upstairs, unseen, at death’s door with stomach cancer. Downstairs, three of the four Webb sisters re-unite in the tacky public parlor and wait for the other, Joan, a singer, to fly in from the lush life of California to join the deathwatch.
Her plane has been delayed. “So where is she? Where’s our famous sister?,” Gloria Webb (Leanne Best) asks, of “St. Joan Patron Saint of Favorite Children.” To which the dutiful and nervy Jill (Helena Wilson), the youngest, and their mother’s jejune, unmarried custodian, responds, “Well, keep an eye out that window. If you see a stretch limo. Or helicopter. Shall we put bunting up?” To the nurse, Jill says, “It’s imperative.... I promised Mum. I promised her Joan would be here.” And to Gloria, she’s equally adamant. “I know my sister. If Joan says she’s coming, she’s coming.”
While they wait, the married siblings gabble about their matrimonial bags of rocks and the doofuses to whom they’re forever joined in sour wedlock. The guesthouse, which is called the Seaview, foreshadows Veronica’s capacity for self-deception: it has no view of the sea. The myth of the deluxe extends to the clientele, who, as one daughter later recalls, were mainly “alkies, swindlers, the lost.” This roll call of the unmoored unwittingly includes Veronica and her girls.
They are at once prisoners and practitioners of their mother’s habitual dreaming, clueless about how to galvanize their stalled lives. The play deftly segues between their hapless adulthood and 1955, when they were promising youngsters being groomed as a sort of Andrews Sisters tribute group. Both living off the fumes of their desperate mother’s ambitious gas and the atmosphere of anticipation that popular songs inspired. As the performing teens come into focus for the first time, they can be heard singing, “I’m headed West to make these dreams of mine come true … ”
Enchantment has its root in chanson, the French word for “song,” and the Webb ménage is spellbound. Song is what they see as their ticket out from isolation. Together, Veronica’s little foot soldiers of fame repeat her mantra: “A song is a dream. A song is a place to be. Somewhere you can live. And in that place, there are no walls. No boundaries. No locks. No keys. You can go anywhere.”
“Songs,” Plato wrote in Laws, “are spells for souls directed in all earnest to the production of … concord.” But what Veronica has in mind is not so much harmony as hegemony. “Prosper?! Prosper?! You want ‘prosper,’ go to work in a bank,” she tells Jack, a resident, cheeky chappy living on “hot air and tick,” who wants to help the act and claims to have show-biz connections. Veronica continues: “I want them to live. To soar.... My girls are the Webbs. And the Webbs aren’t 10-a-penny. ”
As Donnelly expertly plays her, Veronica exudes all the stiff-necked pride of the defeated. A sort of pint-size “Norma” Vincent Peale, she spouts the gospel of success, struggle, and stick-to-itiveness. “It’s not for the fainthearted, the uncommitted, the weak, or the wheezy,” she tells her mostly obedient little troupers, essentially appropriating their childhood to satisfy her appetite for glory.
Young Joan (Laura Donnelly), the oldest of the sisters and the balkiest, has an eye for the boys and enjoys a rebellious cigarette. Nonetheless, she knuckles under her mother’s tyrannical regime, which includes swearing an oath “not to kill my sisters’ dreams” and “to show.... [her] mother the respect she deserves.” The entire family’s mental space is consumed by Veronica’s drills and dicta. The mind is dramatized as useless.
The guesthouse, which is called the Seaview, foreshadows Veronica’s capacity for self-deception: it has no view of the sea.
The Hills of California is trying to trap an atmosphere of thoughtlessness, where what is known can’t be admitted, and what is unknown can’t be imagined. The play is replete with signals of this refusal to think. In its first beats, Jill lights a cigarette, then almost immediately tells her mother’s nurse she’s never smoked. When introduced later to the same nurse, Gloria claims that she’s the eldest sister. “Joan’s the eldest,” Jill snaps, only to be served her own mental subterfuge by Gloria. “The reason you’re stuck here, chuck, is because you get to the corner of the street, your knees knock,” Gloria says sarcastically, adding, “Face it. You’re not here for Mum. You’re hiding.” Instead of challenging this criticism, Jill flourishes an old photo of their mother with baby Joan, a psychological volte-face that proves Gloria’s point. The flare-up occurs just as Jill and Ruby, the final sister (Ophelia Lovibond), start to sing “It Never Entered My Mind.”
To dramatize the family’s passion for ignorance in all its sly and subversive manifestations requires a particularly nuanced touch—to make each character’s stuckness at once mysterious and riveting. It’s a game of hide-and-seek, which the director, Sam Mendes, and Butterworth, who collaborated on the hugely successful The Ferryman, build slowly and confidently to its final wallop. They know how to tell a good commercial story, to instruct by pleasing. The Hills of California sends their irony solid.
Talent is the punch, the saying goes; tact, the clever footwork. Here, that tact is never more clever or more clearly on display than when Veronica holds an audition for her girls in the kitchen, to impress Luther St. John (Corey Johnson), an American show-business manager with legitimate record-producing credentials. When the girls make their entrance, dolled up in pink garrison caps and skimpy, matching pink mufti, they stage a rambunctious rendition of “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,” alongside tasty choreography by Ellen Kane, with far more flash and fun than the Andrews Sisters’ pedestrian moves.
The Webb sisters’ performance is a wow, which makes St. John’s reaction all the more bewildering. “I’m afraid there’s a problem,” he says. The problem is the Andrews Sisters. “It’s not what the public wants today,” he says. “I think you’ll find it is,” Veronica says, reining in her irritation as she desperately tries to refute the claim and win favor for her girls. “Have you heard of Elvis Presley?” he asks, a polite question that blindsides her. “I don’t know what that is,” she responds, exposing the folly of her tunnel vision. “I don’t understand,” she keeps repeating. St. John sees star quality only in young Joan, who is called back into the kitchen and interviewed about herself, including her tastes in music, which are broader than her mother’s: Johnny Mercer, Fats Waller, Nat King Cole, whom she considers “hip” and whom St. John claims to have discovered.
They are at once prisoners and practitioners of their mother’s habitual dreaming.
In this superbly orchestrated scene, with its cross-currents of conflicting needs, Joan’s dream is on the verge of accidentally coming true while Veronica’s is slipping away, but not without an undertow of battle. Veronica balks at the song Joan is asked to sing, and at St. John’s request for a private room for the audition. “Perhaps you and I could go up to the Mississippi?”—the rooms at the Seaview are all grandly named after American states—“and discuss this,” she says, words to which Donnelly gives the most delicate hint of suggestiveness.
“Forgive me, but you’re not the talent here,” St. John says, a wounding line that lingers just as ambiguously in the air and stops Veronica in her tracks. “Joan,” Veronica says finally, “show Luther Mississippi.” As staged, Gloria hides in the shadows of the stairway as St. John and Joan disappear into the room, and Veronica stands motionless below. We hear the distant sound of Joan singing “When I Fall in Love,” and then, in the middle of a verse, the singing stops. The question of why hangs in the charged silence that ends the second act.
When Joan finally arrives at the Seaview, it’s to the sound of the Rolling Stones’s “Gimme Shelter” on the rewired jukebox. She exudes a burned-out ennui that signals another thing about the California hills: they’re dangerous. It’s easy to get lost, and by the louche, exhausted look of her, she is. “I feel like someone xeroxed me across the planet. But before they did, they wiped their ass on me,” she says. Joan, it turns out, has made no family contact—“no cards, no birthdays”—for 20 years. Her radical silence has rendered the family out of sight and out of mind. Her thoughtlessness is punishing, at once an attack and a defense, an expression of both hate and shame. After one unsuccessful album, her life has consisted of communes, drugs, and, by her own admission, many abortions. She has more or less killed her heart.
“Have you elected a scapegoat?” she asks her sisters almost immediately, stonewalling their inevitable recriminations. Joan stands accused, by Gloria, of some kind of soul murder. Is she responsible for killing her sisters’ dreams? For making their mother ill and an alcoholic because of her having orchestrated the encounter that led to Joan’s abortion at 15). These are Gloria’s vituperative claims, which Joan calls her “song.”
“I’m a character in that song, like Mr. Bojangles, Mack the Knife. Is it true? Fuck yeah. For her.” The “song” Joan sings to her sisters describes a Pyrrhic victory. She tells of recently having taken a job delivering pizza in Los Angeles, and on her first day, delivering one to Maxene Andrews, she of the well-known group, to whom she tells the saga of the Webb Sisters and ends up drinking and singing their repertoire with Patty and Maxene until the early hours. “Is that a true story?,” Jill asks. “It’s a good one, right? A good story,” Joan says, who swears “every word” is true. But is it? Or is it sugar to swat the fly?
In Butterworth’s melodrama of mindlessness, Joan can’t be coaxed upstairs, even to pay last respects to her mother, or to sign a family photo. “Is this supposed to melt my frozen heart?” she asks. Joan’s heart isn’t so much frozen as uninformed. She can’t process anything. She’s lost to herself. Although she won’t do a favor for Jill, she’s returned to ask for one: that favor is languishing unattended on the porch, her five-month-old daughter, Betty Ocean Sky. “I thought one of you … might take her for a bit. I know I’ll only mess up..... It’s just for a month or two. Three, tops.”
The baby is finally taken by Jill, a self-proclaimed virgin with no talent for connection or for life. “You can change her name. Call her anything you like,” Joan says, adding: “When she, uh, cries, or if he needs a nap, I sing to her. O.K.? She loves ‘Superstar,’ by the Carpenters. “Two of us …” And she loves the old ones.” The line gets Joan to the piano; she begins to play “Dream a Little Dream of Me,” and all the sisters join in.
The epigram to The Hills of California is from Joni Mitchell’s “Little Green,” a song about giving up her daughter for adoption, which ends with “Little Green, have a happy ending.” Here, what sounds like a happy ending is a scene of desolation. As Joan exits without so much as a fare-thee-well, young Joan croons Gus Kahn’s emollient lullaby. “Sweet dreams till sunbeams find you / Sweet dreams that leave all worries behind you / But in your dreams, whatever they be—” The song abruptly stops and the lights go out on that unfinished line. The word dream hovers over the stage, a picture of abandonment juxtaposed with forgetfulness. The stunning split-second darkness is more than the show’s button, it’s an assertion. Dreams are something you wakeup from. As we know from fairy tales, only the disenchanted are free.
The Hills of California in on at the Harold Pinter Theater in London until June 1
John Lahr is a Columnist at AIR MAIL and the first critic to win a Tony Award, for co-authoring Elaine Stritch at Liberty
