Uncle Tony went to America to seek his fortune and succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. “He was like this big CEO, the president of Coca-Cola America,” recalls Jez Butterworth of his relation, who even acquired an American accent as he made his way from Rochdale to master of the universe.
When Uncle Tony returned to visit the little house in St Albans that Butterworth grew up in, it was as if someone unspeakably glamorous had materialised in the living room. “He was magical,” says the playwright. “There was a glow to all things American in the late 70s for English people, certainly for my family.” But this return was also painful to little Jez because of how his father reacted. “I watched my dad change into someone who fawned over his brother. Like a complete personality change. I found it excruciating.”
This unsettling homecoming appears, transfigured, in Butterworth’s new, Olivier-nominated play The Hills of California. In it, for the best part of two hours, three Webb sisters have been trading machine-gun Lancastrian repartee in a faded Blackpool guesthouse in the long hot summer of 1976, while their mother lies dying from cancer upstairs.
But then something happens. Joan – the fourth sister, who blew off this coastal get-together and ditched her mother’s dream of transforming her girls into an all-singing, all-dancing Andrews Sisters knockoff – returns. As one of two characters performed by Butterworth’s real-life partner Laura Donnelly, Joan is a projection of American glamour, much like Uncle Tony. Imperious, wearing flared jeans and rhyming eye shadow, Joan even talks like an American. Blackpool has never seen the like. One sister, Ruby, instantly mutates from whip-smart woman to helpless drooler.
This is not the only moment in The Hills of California that sees Butterworth working through things in drama that he couldn’t cope with in reality. The death of his sister Joanna in 2012, from brain cancer at the age of 48, hangs over the play. “She had been diagnosed as terminal in 2010,” says Butterworth, speaking to me in the London conference room of theatre producer Sonia Friedman. “For the last six months, she was living in the cottage next door to the farmhouse in Somerset I lived in with my wife and young kids.” This was his first wife, film editor Gilly Richardson, and their daughters Mabel and Grace. “So what happens in the play – a family gathering at a deathbed – was based on something that actually took place. I lived through all of those moments.”
Real life provided material for The Hills of California in one further poignant way. In the second act, we flashback to the guesthouse in 1955. Mother Veronica Webb has arranged an audition with an American talent scout, who claims to have discovered Nat King Cole. As Dr Luther St Joan manspreads diabolically in his easy chair, Webb’s school-age daughters leap on to a table and perform Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy from Company B, shaking their tassled skirts and silken military epaulettes. It’s a pivotal moment – and it draws on Butterworth’s dealings with Harvey Weinstein.
Butterworth was working in Hollywood 25 years ago. “I was directing my first film.” This was the erotic comedy Birthday Girl, starring Nicole Kidman and Ben Chaplin. “I was sent to Hollywood to audition actors in the Peninsula Hotel. And most of those were the actors who later came out and said what they said [about Weinstein]. I didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t know then that he was somebody up to his neck in smashed dreams, in lives he had ruined. I was a man. No one was trying to fuck me or assault me. But that was my first experience of that world.”
Cut back to that audition in Butterworth’s play. Luther tells Veronica that her daughters’ act is past its sell-by date. Hasn’t she heard of Elvis Presley? Rock’n’roll is sweeping popular culture and a 1940s-style close harmony girl group has no place in such a libidinous future. And yet, Luther says, one of her daughters might have something. He asks Veronica to let Joan sing for him in private upstairs. Butterworth dangles the possibility that Luther rapes Joan and that Veronica, out of misplaced devotion, is complicit.
However, says Butterworth, The Hills of California is not his #MeToo drama. “I spend the vast majority of my day in a dreamworld pushing around ideas that don’t really relate to anything identifiably. To say this is a #MeToo play is like saying a rainbow is blue. There’s blue in it, sure.”
In any case, Butterworth has already settled his dealings with Weinstein – and not just when he punched the sexual predator. While working on Birthday Girl, Weinstein punched a producer he wanted to fire. Butterworth, who wanted the producer to remain, hit Weinstein in return. “If Harvey wants to start throwing punches,” said the British playwright, who boxed while studying at Cambridge, “he should know that I know what to do.”
In 2017, Butterworth read out a letter on BBC Newsnight. “Harvey,” it began. “My daughter is 11 years old and all her life has dreamed of being a performer. She attends a local drama group and loves to sing, dance and act. Were she one day able to realise those dreams, and had Ashley Judd and others not been brave enough to come forward, there’s every chance in a few years’ time she would have been taken to a hotel, duped by your staff, ended up alone with you, and chased round the suite by you, naked, masturbating, threatening her, terrifying her, for your own enjoyment.”
Butterworth, who has just turned 55, tells me of another meeting with Weinstein. In 1997, the producer attended a London screening of Mojo, the film version of Butterworth’s 1995 debut play. He was thinking of buying it. Like The Hills of California, Mojo unfolds in a milieu of music, money and sexual predation. In the film, Harold Pinter played a gangster and predator grooming a helpless young rocker. Butterworth quotes this sleazeball’s catchphrase: “Tickle, tickle.” When Pinter said those words in the film, Weinstein stood up and left. The Miramax mogul didn’t buy the film.
Butterworth met Laura Donnelly in 2012 when she starred in his play The River, alongside Dominic West. Donnelly has become his muse – and mother to his third and fourth daughters, Radha, seven, and Ailbhe, six. He wrote the leading role of Caitlin for her in his 2017 drama The Ferryman, a play set on a County Armagh farmhouse in 1981, at the time Bobby Sands and nine other republican prisoners starved themselves to death in the Maze prison. The drama turned on a missing brother and the arrival of an IRA power-broker, details culled from Donnelly’s family history.
He often writes this way. While working on his 2009 play Jerusalem, he imagined Mark Rylance as lead character Johnny “Rooster” Byron. This may be why the drama is regularly described as one of the best of the 21st century. “It’s like making a bespoke suit,” says Butterworth. “You’re making it for that person. And the best thing is, they’re helping you.”
It’s a little more complicated than that, though. When he and his brother John-Henry worked on Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, they knew Phoebe Waller-Bridge was slated to play Indy’s goddaughter.
“That changed the way we approached the script. I thought of her, not so much as Fleabag, but as Katharine Hepburn.” As a posh but adorable plot-driving irritant? “Exactly! Imagining who you’re writing for has always been inspiring to me. Even if no one has been cast, I might imagine I’m writing a role for, say, Jimmy Stewart.”
His next challenge is to write a role for Cillian Murphy that’s so dazzling it will eclipse even the Irishman’s Oscar-winning turn as J Robert Oppenheimer. He and John-Henry are adapting Blood Runs Coal, Mark A Bradley’s book about the murders of union leader Joseph Yablonski, his wife and daughter ordered by United Mine Workers president, “Tough Tony” Boyle. Murphy will play Yablonski’s son, an attorney out for justice and revenge. “It feels Greek,” he says of the shocking story. “Often, when you’re writing, you’re bending bits of a story to make it feel Greek – and sometimes it’s just sitting there. This one’s just sitting there.”
There can be problems with writing roles for certain actors, though. When he and John-Henry wrote the script for Ford v Ferrari, the 2019 motor-racing flick, the two stars for whom they had tailored the script dropped out. “Matt Damon and Christian Bale do the most incredible jobs,” says Butterworth, “with parts that were written for Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt.”
• The Hills of California is at Harold Pinter theatre, London, until 15 June
