Don’t be fooled by the pink spangly costumes and cheesy grins. This gloriously written tragicomedy with sensational performances across the board is a piercing elegy to the ties that don’t just bind but suffocate down the years.
Set in the ‘public front room’ of the clapped-out Blackpool Sea View motel during the sweltering summer of 1976, there’s a drought and distinctly no sea view, metaphors for dried-up dreams, forever out of reach for four sisters reuniting as their mother lies dying above the tatty Tiki bar and broken jukebox.
Unseen throughout, Ma Veronica looms large as mousy, virginal youngest Jill (Helena Wilson), gobbily furious Gloria (Leanne Best) and vivacious but nervy Ruby (Ophelia Lovibond) anxiously await the return of long-lost eldest Joan, who fled Stateside decades ago. Ostensibly to seek fame… but the spectre of unspoken secrets haunts as much as the fading presence upstairs.
Nobody writes percussive dialogue like Butterworth. Hilarious grenades laced with affection or fury pepper over pathos and pain, mirth and melancholy. Colloquial rhythms ring so true you can taste the time and place. Best gives a masterclass as Gloria, sweatily skewering everyone in range, herself included, with devastating rapid-fire accuracy. It’s magnificent.
Everyone is unhappy and Veronica is painted as a drunken, wretched shadow of her former self. As we start to suspect the answers lie in the past, Rob Howell’s stunning set, topped by a labyrinthine wooden staircase stretching up out of sight, rotates to reveal the family kitchen back in the 1950s.
There we find a toweringly magnificent younger Veronica (a sensational Laura Donnelly) drilling her girls in the family kitchen to become the next Andrews Sisters. We fluidly dance between the two periods, divided only by a curtained doorway, gradually laying bare a ferocious maternal love and the price it makes everyone pay.
The four young actors playing the daughters hold their own against their flawless older counterparts. Gorgeous close harmony vocals and impeccable acting from both incarnations, are matched by strong support from the male cast who each play a wildly different character in the past and present with ease.
The props, costumes and make-up are flawless, the attention to detail as beautiful as the dialogue. I even noticed Gloria’s husband had one red sunburned forearm, from the long drive down in the blazing sun.
At three hours, though, it is overlong, the wait for adult Joan built to an impossible-to-match expectation. Repeated told that she was Veronica’s favourite, the one most like her, it’s no surprise when Donnelly appears, commandingly transforming from the fiercely controlled, ambitious young Veronica into a jaded, free-loving California burn-out.
The climactic showdown bites deep, resentments rage free, secrets finally erupt. But the pacing is off, and the script falters frustratingly in the strangely sentimental final scene.
Even so, a slightly flawed Butterworth performed by artists of this calibre is still worth ten of so many other shows I have endured.
THE HILLS OF CALIFORNIA IS PLAYING AT THE HAROLD PINTER THEATRE TO JUNE 15