Follow Jez Butterworth’s compulsive plays and you can catch the drift of the British theatre over four decades. Mojo (1996): zoot suits and snarls; the urban snap of Pinter. Jerusalem (2009): dark and glorious, a lament for, and celebration of, a fraying countryside. The Ferryman (2017): a tribute to the great lift of Irish dramatic writing.
Now The Hills of California: part of the slow female-isation of the stage. Last week, Beth Steel’s rousing Till the Stars Come Down showed – with a great lash of language and velocity of action – sisters coming together for a disruptive family wedding in their Nottinghamshire home. In Butterworth’s new play, women gather around their dying mother in the Blackpool boarding house where they spent their 1950s childhoods some 20 years earlier. The resort’s pizazz has faded but illusions linger.
Butterworth is ingenious about the way fantasy traps and inspires. The house is called Sea View – which is not true. The rooms are given the names of American states: “I’m going to Minnesota” may mean going to the room next to the lav. Rob Howell’s crammed design – dark brown bannisters, many lamps and a bar with a tufty straw roof – captures a sense of stranded hope, but less realism might have suggested more of the wan beauty of the play’s central conceit. This dying mother dreamed of making her daughters into a mini-version of wartime boogie-woogie trio the Andrews Sisters.
The girls’ routine, awkward and impressive, is seen and heard in flashback: Sophia Ally, Nancy Allsop, Lara McDonnell and Nicola Turner sing and elbow wonderfully in their apricot uniforms, with alarming shiny stockings, air-hostess hats and tasselled skirts. The dream of stage success is an illusion, which leads to the drama’s main secret and shock, yet the harmonies are real and implant enduring memories: songs are beautifully envisaged as places in which to dwell and hide.
Sam Mendes’s production is motored by fine acting from Leanne Best (ravaging hectically), Ophelia Lovibond and Helena Wilson, and by a gleaming central performance from Laura Donnelly, who manages to be apparently all-too-obvious and yet ultimately mysterious: details of what she actually does would spoil the pivot of the plot. The evening unfolds gradually – the opening scene could do with some of the musical zip that comes later; its pleasures come not from surprises of form or linguistic intensity, but from unexpected observations, social excavation.
I love the idea planted here that there is a male category that is the opposite of trophy wives: lumpy or mildly vacant men who potter around doing hobbies and funny voices and have been selected by their women because they elevate them. I love the promotion of the Andrews Sisters, with their disconcerting mixture of attack and seduction: the dulcet quality of their harmonising undercut by the jagged swing of their jaws and hips. It would be hard to claim a place now for some of their calypso renderings – but bring on more listens to Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.
Lemn Sissay, poetic champion of the outcast, has written a new adaptation of Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis: man turns into a beetle and finds everyone has turned against him. It is directed by Scott Graham, of the physical theatre company Frantic Assembly, who speed their productions with gesture and movement, abolishing the distinction between walking and dancing, between flesh and furniture: they pass bodies to each other in the air like parcels. The combination of talents should be perfect for Kafka’s 1915 novella, but the result is disappointingly stuck and hectoring. How can a play about change move so little?
Metamorphosis poses obvious physical challenges for the theatre, but it is rich in interpretative possibilities. Eighteen years ago at the same theatre, with music by Nick Cave and an elastic performance by Gísli Örn Garðarsson – a member of the Icelandic national gymnastic team – it effortlessly became a portrait of fascism. Sissay brings his own particular focus: there are thunderous passages about unremitting labour, poverty and whip-cracking officials, but a new fierce emphasis on the experience of being outcast by family. The main character is turned into an adopted child, less cherished than his sister, with whom he has an incestuous brush.
Sissay fills the mouth of his hero with ferociously gibbering descriptions of gargoyles, skeleton-headed storks and his mother becoming a lampshade. Simisola Majekodunmi’s lighting throws giant fractured shadows over the faded room on the verge of squalor designed by Jon Bausor. Though Felipe Pacheco never attains full beetledom, he has a bristling moment with chair legs, and increasingly treats the stage like a series of perches, brilliantly balancing on the iron bedhead, hanging upside down from the ceiling, dangling from the light cord.
These strong elements don’t fuse or urge each other on. Pacheco’s extraordinary movements take place in the background while speeches are delivered at full roar, like diatribes. The result is not an embodiment of horror but a self-conscious metaphor.
The most revelatory moment in Candace Bushnell’s one-woman show comes when she asks her huge audience of Sex and the City fans to guess which parts of the series were based on her own life. Yes: she did go out with a senator. But, no: he didn’t ask her to pee on him. It’s a rare nugget. On stage with a bright pink sofa, and (knowing winks) a shoe closet, Bushnell delivers two hours of screechingly bland self-promotion in a voice as thin as her Manolo Blahnik stilettos, her face rigid with surprise at her surpriseless script. It seems impossible that the evening will pass without one squeak of irony being heard, but so it proves.
The bulk of the weightless occasion is made up of a list of the times Bushnell got on to the New York Times bestseller list, self-help injunctions and the weird view that women will be freed by being told to behave like old-fashioned blokes. Bushnell tells us she has “helped change the way the world looks at women”. Not necessarily for the better. Give me the Andrews Sisters any day.
Star ratings (out of five)
The Hills of California ★★★★
Metamorphosis ★★
Candace Bushnell: True Tales of Sex, Success and Sex and the City ★
The Hills of California is at the Harold Pinter theatre, London, until 15 June
Metamorphosis is at the Lyric Hammersmith, London, until 2 March
