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Doing Less With More: The Hills of California
Jez Butterworth’s latest play, directed by Sam Mendez, is an array of overfamiliar archetypes and under-thought choices.
Mendes’s directorial brain seems stuck in Hollywood these days, and his approach to Hills is shockingly lazy: When characters reach big, important speeches, they turn downstage and deliver them straight out to that misty spot above the audience’s heads. There’s naïve Jill (Nicola Turner and then, in adulthood, Helena Wilson), excitable Ruby (Sophia Ally and Ophelia Lovibond), and fretful Gloria (Nancy Allsop and Leanne Best); and then—played by Lara McDonnell as a teen and by Donnelly in a pointed piece of double-casting as an adult—there’s Joan. And no playwright and director without vast resources would add multiple actors to an already huge ensemble only to use them in one tiny scene each (Max Roll, Ellyn Heald, and Cameron Scoggins all flash by in roles that could easily have been doubled, like plenty of other parts in the cast).
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