‘Hills of California’ Review: A Stage Mother’s Unhappy Brood

In Jez Butterworth’s new play, we — the audience and protagonists alike — are kept waiting and wondering.

It’s the summer of 1976 and Britain is in the midst of a heat wave. In Blackpool, a seaside town in northwestern England, three sisters, Jill, Ruby and Gloria, are reunited in the guesthouse that had been the childhood home, because their hotelier mother, Veronica, is dying of cancer. They must decide whether to put her out of her misery with a high dose of morphine, or let her continue to suffer.

A fourth sister, Joan, had emigrated to the United States 20 years earlier to launch a music career, and hasn’t been in touch with the family since. Will she come home now? Why did she cut contact? Well, she had her reasons.

“The Hills of California,” written by Butterworth (“The Ferryman,” “Jerusalem”) and directed by Sam Mendes (“The Lehmann Trilogy”), runs at the Harold Pinter Theater in London, through June 15. Rob Howell’s impressive set makes the most of the playhouse’s nearly 40-foot grid height, with three flights of stairs leading up to the unseen guest rooms.

The action unfolds on the first floor, where an endearingly tacky bamboo drinks bar and large metal jukebox imbue the cheap-and-cheerful Blackpool stylings with a quiet, sentimental dignity. The hotel is called the Seaview but you can’t actually see the water from its windows. The dialogue is zippy, the humor sharp, dark and irreverent. A minor character sets the tone in an early exchange with Jill: “How’s your mother? The nurse says she’s dying.”

At several points, the set rotates to show us the hotel’s kitchen quarters, and we are transported back to the 1950s. We see the sisters as teenagers (played by four younger actors), under the rigorous if somewhat domineering stewardship of their mother, Veronica (an imperiously poised Laura Donnelly), who trains them up as a song and dance troupe. They rehearse songs by The Andrews Sisters, as well as the 1948 hit by Johnny Mercer and the Pied Pipers that gives the play its title. (The music is arranged by Candida Caldicot.)