He has built a reputation as one of Britain’s most revered modern playwrights, but Jez Butterworth’s career in film has evidently inspired the subjects he is now willing to take on.
The dramatist was 29 when he worked with the disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein on the 2001 erotic thriller, Birthday Girl, and it is clear the experience has continued to haunt him.
Butterworth’s new, highly anticipated play, The Hills of California – his first in seven years – is a multilayered, post-#MeToo story about grief, trauma and the trials women are forced to endure to realise their dreams.
Set in a Blackpool boarding house during the summer heatwave of 1976, it tells the story of the Webb sisters who reunite at the deathbed of their mother, Veronica. While awaiting the arrival of their fourth sister, Joan, who became estranged after leaving for California 20 years ago, the women begin to piece together the watershed events of their teenage lives.
The show then jumps back to 1955, and we learn how their widowed mother had obsessively trained them as a singing group akin to the Andrews sisters in the hope of fame and success. And how a fateful run-in with a predatory American agent extinguished the spark within Joan and – in ways direct and incidental – marred all of their lives thereafter.
Such incidents are what Butterworth has called “bleak but commonplace”.
“My very early experiences in the film business were with Miramax, specifically Harvey Weinstein,” he told BBC Front Row this week. “It became very clear, very quickly that that was the rules of the game. I was meeting actresses in California who wanted to do my film but would not talk to me because they’d had encounters with him.”
During a street brawl, Butterworth once punched Weinstein after the then all-powerful film mogul hit another colleague. Years later, as the accusations against Weinstein mounted, Butterworth read out an open letter on the BBC’s Newsnight programme, urging him to “think of all those little 11-year-old girls, over decades, whose singular talents you have taken advantage of, whose dreams you have decisively and for ever defined”.
The promise of lost dreams weaves through every scene of The Hills of California.
The play, which runs at the Harold Pinter theatre in London until June, reunites the team behind Butterworth’s 2017 hit play The Ferryman, including Oscar-winning director Sam Mendes, set designer Rob Howell, and actor Laura Donnelly (Butterworth’s partner) who plays both Veronica and Joan.
It’s a big shift from the writer’s previous dramas, which were lauded for their exploration of masculinity and national identity. The Hills of California is dominated by women, with the men playing secondary characters who are either predatory or hapless (in the case of the sisters’ husbands). “I found when I wrote this play, that every time a man walked on, he was sent off to fulfil an errand of some kind or other … I was entertained by the fact that the women in this tale just keep pushing them off of the stage,” Butterworth told the BBC.
This departure appears to be partly the result of changes in the writer’s own life. He’s said that having four daughters – two with Donnelly and two with his former wife, Gilly Richardson – had contributed to a new perspective. “Someone is delivering something to the house, I’ll keep them talking because days can go by without me talking to a man. That’s gone on for years and then suddenly it’s the voice I’m writing in,” he told the Times recently.
![‘[Actors] wanted to do my film but would not talk to me because they’d had encounters with him,’ said Jez Butterworth of Harvey Weinstein, above, pictured in court.](https://media.guim.co.uk/81f173c956bf09a92b994969c81d99aec6d3c8de/0_39_3500_2101/1000.jpg)
Butterworth’s shows have attracted acclaim. His breakout came with the play Mojo, which premiered at the Royal Court in 1995. The black comedy set in 1950s gangland Soho drew comparisons to Quentin Tarantino, and received numerous awards including an Olivier for best new comedy and an Evening Standard Award for most promising playwright.
That was followed by The Night Heron, the Winterling, and Parlour Song. But it wasn’t until 2009’s Jerusalem that he became a household name.
Cited as the best play of the 21st century, Jerusalem starred Mark Rylance as Johnny “Rooster” Byron, an eccentric drug dealer who is being evicted from his caravan in a Wiltshire wood. The play, hailed for capturing a sense of Englishness, was a runaway success – transferring from the Royal Court to the West End (where it had people queueing for tickets from 3am) and then Broadway, before touring the UK and internationally.
Butterworth had another massive hit with The Ferryman, which became the fastest-selling play in the history of the Royal Court. Inspired by Donnelly’s family, it told the story of a Northern Irish family during the Troubles, and one uncle who falls in with the IRA and is “disappeared”.
Today, Butterworth has two Olivier awards and a Tony to his name. But his love of writing and performing was nurtured decades ago during his undergraduate years at Cambridge University (where contemporaries included the actor Rachel Weisz and the journalist James Harding).
The writer, who was born in London and grew up in St Albans, Hertfordshire, was one of five siblings. His mother was a dental nurse, his father a lorry driver who won a scholarship to Oxford in middle age and became a lecturer in trade union law.
Meanwhile, his sister, Joanna, who worked as a registrar at the Lamda drama school, died from brain cancer in 2012 at the age of 46. She moved into Butterworth’s cottage in her final months, so he witnessed first-hand how a person faces death. “What happens in 24 hours in this play happened over six months,” he has said.
Setting the play in Blackpool was a tribute to his dad, who hailed from Rochdale. But in general, the writer sees his settings as “away games” – distant, unfamiliar places and times that afford him the space to write about matters more close to him. He and Donnelly (dubbed by Vogue as theatre’s “coolest power couple”) divide their time between north London and Devon.
The Hills of California, which also stars Ophelia Lovibond, Leanne Best, Helena Wilson, Bryan Dick and Shaun Dooley, is Butterworth’s eighth play in almost 30 years. He credits his screenwriting with giving him freedom to take risks in his plays – his scripted movies and shows include James Bond films Skyfall and Spectre, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, and the marital drama Mammals on Prime Video. He has often collaborated with his brothers John-Henry and Tom, who are also screenwriters, while his third brother, Steve, is a producer.
Reviews for The Hills of California have ranged from three stars in the Guardian to four and five stars elsewhere. But the excitement in the bars and stalls of the Harold Pinter theatre – whose eponym was a friend and inspiration of Butterworth’s – showed he remains one of the most talked-about figures in contemporary theatre.
