California Dreaming

The Hills of California

A Jez Butterworth play comes with high expectations.  As usual I deliberately hadn’t looked at reviews although I did see a lot of 4 stars so I was seated and ready, as was the youngish (good) but quite noisy (bad) audience.

The play is set completely in the Seaview Guesthouse (previously Seaview Guesthouse and Spa - but with no view of the sea).  And we open in the public lounge - a seventies classic with broken jukebox and a tropical themed bar.  Three of the family’s four daughters are assembling as their mother Veronica lies dying upstairs.  It’s Blackpool in the midst of the drought of 1976 and everybody is very very hot. This first scene tells us a lot about the family dynamics (mother upstairs is still keeping up appearances wearing her wig) and the women are arguing about whether Joan, who moved to California 20 years ago and has never been back, will show.

So, a family drama about grief and loss mixed in with a lot of family dynamics.  And the heat gives us the feel of those family melodramas set in the American South.  It gets interesting when we go back in time though to when the women were children, being coached by their mother into being the new Andrews sisters.  And here we can see the ambition of Veronica for her children, the stories she is prepared to tell and the lengths she is prepared to go to, all to make it happen.  The rest of the play deals with the repercussions of that ambition.  So, a well written family drama dealing with big dreams and ambition,  dashed hopes and all sorts of angst but with some lovely four part harmonies.  An interesting element was added by the question of when it is too painful and it’s time to let go.

I picked up a programme and that had an essay about Blackpool, a place of big dreams, overselling itself and not recognising when the world has moved on, and at that point it all clicked into place for me and the play suddenly all made sense. Great performances from all the adult cast, particularly Laura Donnelly as Veronica; in a very clever move she also doubles as adult Joan, who does get to live out those dreams, however tawdry and disappointing things turn out to be in reality.  The young cast are all very impressive too.  

This is a long play, and although I understand the pauses were trying to create the languor that comes with stifling heat and a pressure cooker of emotions it made me just a tad twitchy - there was probably a bit of room to knock 10 minutes off the runtime without anyone really noticing.  And I couldn’t really see the point of the second pause for a scene change - with a revolving stage I thought they could have managed very well without.  I loved the writing though, particularly in the first half of the play with beautifully rich and detailed dialogue, but somehow in the second half the plot got got a bit hokey and too neat in places, and the voices got a bit too shouty.  But this play continues Butterworth’s look at those big talkers and dreamers who never quite make it happen in the way they would wish.  Overall I liked it a lot. 

The Time is Always Now

Earlier I popped into the National Portrait Gallery and the exhibition The Time is Always now - Artists Reframe the Black Figure which is definitely worth a visit.  Loved this work by Barbara Walker 

and also this one by Titus Kaphar