It's no Jerusalem: Jez Butterworth's Hills of California, at Harold Pinter Theatre, reviewed

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. Here, the audience fights to maintain interest

We then skip to the 1950s and watch the young quartet in the hands of their powerful mother (Laura Donnelly), who trains the girls with a loving but steely hand. She forces them to practise endlessly and she instils in them the emotional grit and discipline they’ll need to cope with life in showbiz. The characters in this play have evidently been shaped to suit contemporary tastes: all the women are smart, intrepid, adventurous, heroic, plucky and free-thinking. As for the men, they’re a bunch of nerds, predators and misfits.

The girls’ mother receives a visit from a mysterious promoter who manages Perry Como and claims to have discovered Nat King Cole. He wants to see the quartet in action, especially Joan, and he keeps dropping hints that he’s about to produce a big variety show in the West End.