Please note that the following article contains spoilers about the plot of The Hills of California.
There’s a moment, two hours into watching Jez Butterworth’s The Hills of California, when you get the feeling that every audience member is holding their breath.
Desperately striving to turn her four teenage daughters into ’50s Blackpool’s own the Andrews Sisters, single mother and guesthouse owner Veronica waits anxiously in the kitchen as her 15-year-old, Joan, heads upstairs to perform, alone in one of the bedrooms, for an old, male music executive.
Is this the escape from seaside backwaters that she has long promised her children? Or has the showbiz matriarch been complicit in something truly terrible? It’s 10 minutes of excruciating theater and, arguably, the performance of a lifetime from Laura Donnelly, the Belfast-born, much-celebrated actor who plays both the determined Veronica as well as a grown-up, free-spirited Joan returning to the family home 20 years later as her sisters gather at her mother’s deathbed.
For Butterworth, the mind behind “play of the century” Jerusalem, The Hills of California will undoubtedly cement his reputation as Britain’s greatest living playwright. Few productions walk a tightrope between hilarious and devastating as expertly as this one—capturing the chaotic reality of a family who has long lived apart coming back together under one roof. And the production goes further still, presenting a searing examination of a Blackpool that’s a world away from the jolly pleasure beach on nostalgic postcards, one where the sour reality of sexist Carry On humor simmers at its surface—opportunity for women coming only with horrific sacrifice.
Shifting between the ’50s and ’70s, we watch as, one by one, sisters—boisterous Gloria (Leanne Best), sensitive Ruby (Ophelia Lovibond), and rebellious Joan—return to their family home where gentle Jill (Helena Wilson) still lives with their mother. They unpick the stories they’ve told themselves about their past, processing their grief and pain with dark humor, singalongs of the hits their mother trained them to perform, and the kind of cruelty only siblings can inflict.
“Who do we want to be to our children when we’re dead and gone? How do we want them to remember us?” are the questions 41-year-old Donnelly says are posed by the swirling, dreamlike show, which reveals the parallel realities its characters have experienced of their childhoods.
It’s no wonder, then, that motherhood is on Donnelly’s mind as she sits, chin in hand, at the back of a rustic Primrose Hill café when we meet on a crisp, winter afternoon prior to the play’s opening—and not just because we’re surrounded by raucous tables of JoJo Maman Bébé-clad tots. A mother of two—Radha, seven, and Ailbhe, six—with Butterworth, her longtime collaborator, romantic partner, and “favorite writer,” some of the themes of the play were already an increasing preoccupation for the Esther Perel and Gabor Maté fan, “because of the way that children will reflect back to you yourself and, mainly, all your failings.” She adds, with a wry smile: “I’m looking forward to finding out what my children are in therapy complaining about me [for] in 30 years’ time.”
For Donnelly, it has the makings of a career crescendo. Roles in TV hits such as Starz’s time-travel crowd-pleaser Outlander and a turn in Marvel’s Werewolf by Night have gained the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland-trained actor fans around the world. So has a penchant for fabulous red-carpet gowns, such as the Giambattista Valli number she wore for the Met Gala in 2019. But it’s with her extraordinary work on stage with Butterworth where she’s truly made her name. First, with her enchanting performances as “the other woman” in his 2012 anti-romance The River (the play the couple fell in love making). Taylor Swift, Frances McDormand, and Barbra Streisand were just a few of the stars who rushed to see her alongside Hugh Jackman in the Broadway transfer. Nothing compares, though, to the impact of her Olivier-winning, Tony-nominated run as young widow Caitlin in smash hit The Ferryman: a family drama inspired by the true story of the IRA’s disappearing of Donnelly’s uncle in the 1980s.
“I was having a whale of a time in a big Irish cast,” she says. “I never gave any thought to its reception. Had I, maybe we would never have done it, because somebody might’ve pointed out to us that this was an Englishman writing a Northern Irish play or that I was oversharing about my family history.”
The Hills of California is an all-star reunion for the titans behind that theatrical blockbuster. Butterworth has brought back Donnelly, of course, as well as set designer Rob Howell, who has created a “magical” space for the action to play out in—a rickety guesthouse complete with Tiki Bar and jukebox that rotates to take us from past to present—and Oscar-winning director Sam Mendes, fresh from the National’s The Motive and the Cue.
“Laura has a quality you don’t find every day,” says Butterworth, when I ask the potentially thorny question of why he is so often compelled to work with his other half. “It feels that her dignity is constantly at stake. The audience understands on a primal level what’s going on with her characters.” And Mendes? “His attention to detail. He never writes anything down. It’s like he’s in the mafia.”
It took the writer nine years to complete The Hills of California. Chatting over Zoom, from the overflowing library at their home in Devon, where the couple split their time with London, he tells me the original idea was inspired by the eight months he spent gathered with his siblings in 2012, while his sister, Joanna, who had worked at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, was dying of cancer. “I had a tremendous amount of time to reflect on everything that is intense and everything that is tedious about waiting for someone to die,” he says, matter-of-factly, of those weeks. “At my sister’s funeral, it became clear that she’d been four different people. Her friends saw her as the coolest person they’ve ever met. In our family, she played the fool. I think to her work colleagues she was terrifying. Her students saw her as a total mother. What you had, under one roof, when she was dying, was an awful lot of different opinions of somebody.” The resulting play feels like it’s about “one of the fundamental basics of the human experience,” says Donnelly, recognizing that “nobody’s perfect, nobody can get it entirely right.”
There’s a gentle nervousness about Donnelly when I meet her that contrasts with a somewhat sharper appearance: blunt bob, Katharine Hepburn slacks, N.Peal cashmere, bare face. It’s an air that disappears when I see her on stage: full of maternal grit as Veronica and fierce rebelliousness as Jean. Her take on the characters grew away from Butterworth’s eyes. He never spends much time in the rehearsal room during the development of his plays—instead he’s off doing rewrites—but “I get to hear an awful lot about his process as he’s writing, so I know what it is he’s wanting to achieve in each moment,” she says. The pair’s work and domestic lives are often enmeshed like this. “I remember I once had a whiteboard up that said, ‘1. Buy groceries for weekend. 2. Write ending for Ferryman. 3. Get mower mended,’ ” says Butterworth.
Performance has always been a space of escape for Donnelly. Growing up in Belfast, the daughter of a general practitioner “who served both sides of the divided community” and a bereavement counselor, she found the city a “place full of silence and tension and an absolute necessity to conform,” one that the make-up, music, and costumes of balletic Irish dancing offered “relief” from. “It was the closest thing to getting out that I was going to get,” she says.
The Hills of California has Donnelly thinking a lot about those teenage years. “Parenting in the ’80s in Northern Ireland must have been the most complicated job,” she says, playing with a glitter heart ring that her daughter gave her. “I think one of the most important things that my mum did—and I think that it is kind of the best that you can do—is not repeat what you were given. She did a very good job of breaking cycles.”
It’s a rule Donnelly tries to follow with her girls, “letting them be who they are and getting out of the way,” she says. Never letting them feel “their being unruly is any kind of encumbrance.” Another wry laugh. “We’ll see in the therapist’s office whether or not that was successful.”
The Hills of California will be at Harold Pinter Theatre, SW1, until June 15, 2024.