Fifteen years after penning his mega-hit Jerusalem, Jez Butterworth has knocked out a new drama. The slightly baffling title, The Hills of California, refers to a hit by Johnny Mercer (the US songwriter not the MP for Plymouth) and it suggests American themes and locations. But the show is set in a knackered old Blackpool boarding house in the 1970s, where three sisters are waiting for their elderly mum to croak.
It takes an hour of chit-chat to explain what’s happening. When the sisters were little, their ambitious mother forced them to perform song-and-dance routines in the hope of launching them as kiddie superstars on the new medium of television. The eldest girl, Joan, quit the group at the age of 15 and fled to America to make it big. Now she’s on her way back to the musty hovel in Blackpool to give Mum a farewell hug. That’s the set-up.
A good playwright fights for the audience’s interest.
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