*This house. It’s called ‘Sea View’. It’s just I’ve looked out of every window, and you can’t. You can’t see the sea.*
Blackpool, 1976. The driest summer in 200 years. The beaches are packed. The hotels are heaving. In the sweltering backstreets, far from the choc ices and donkey rides, the Webb Sisters are returning to their mother's run-down guest house, as she lies dying upstairs.
Following their multi award-winning triumph *The Ferryman*, Jez Butterworth, writer of *Jerusalem*, resumes his partnership with Sam Mendes, director of *The Lehman Trilogy*, to bring you The Hills of California.
__*The Hills of California* plays at Harold Pinter Theatre from 27 January 2024 for a strictly limited season.__
The denouement, when it comes, provides only a strange and messy sort of closure. There is no through-line here, no moral lesson as such; just the chaotic, meaningless interplay of life force, personalities and contingency. Sometimes, that’s plenty.
Butterworth’s writing is resonant but proceeds at far too languid a pace. Mendes would have done well to have trimmed the three-hour running time, especially given that much is withheld for too long, until a fiery tumble of revelations in the final half hour.
2024 | West End |
West End |
Videos