AMERICAN DREAMS IN FADING BLACKPOOL
Suddenly within a fortnight come two very classy new plays, funny and thoughtful and moving beyond the ordinary. Moreover, in a tiny revolution goth are built around women. Beth Steel’s TILL THE STARS COME DOWN is at the National Theatre (scroll down), and now up West Jez Butterworth follows the mystic-deadbeat caravan England of JERUSALEM and the troubled Ireland of THE FERRYMAN with another mournfully entertaining, dramatically intense tale of female lives.
It is set in the weary, decayed Blackpool of the ‘70s with twenty-year flashbacks to its heyday, and to hopes. The hopes hold a family in thrall to the passionate ambition of the mother Veronica, the father long vanished, possibly dead at war though the story changes for the ‘widow’s convenience and respectability.. She doesn’t want her girls to lark around on the roller coaster, bear five children and end up slaving at the mangle. She wants glamour, beauty, everything that is the distant shangri-la that America seemed in the Britain’s hard postwar years. We are to see her drilling her four children in close-harmony and vaudeville tap, lecturing them on the early trials and disciplines of legendary showbiz figures like the Andrews Sisters . We see this making her become, in some extraordinary moments from Laura Donnelly, a genuinely tragic figure for any century.
But we meet the daughters first as adults in the 70s, in the battered old front room of Seaviw (formerly Seaview guest house, then dubbing itself Seaview Luxury Hotel and Spa, its backstreet glory indicated by a decrepit juke box and a palm-thatched cocktail bar). Somewhere up the dim brown stairs – Rob Howell’s set is so shiveringly evocative you can almost smell the mould – the mother is dying of cancer. She is tended by a down-to earth nurse who is not above murmuring that if the pain gets too much there is a particular doctor’s number to ring, unofficial-like. It’s a hot July, enervating: in a brief bravura scene the piano-tuner (Richard Lumsden) stumps in with eloquently entertaining disgust at the state of the piano – “A piano needs to be played! Salt, damp..” . Without stress, we are offered two fine metaphors: this house’s life has suffered long enervating drought, and many a life becomes a sad unplayed piano.
The plain, nervous domestic daughter Jill is joined by the others: noisy Ruby from Rochdale with husband Dennis, and even noisier Gloria, Leanne Best all fuming attitude and fag with her equally subservient Bill. Missing is the eldest, Joan, who went to America. And perhaps was famous there, only nobody’s heard from her for two decades. Only the adoring Jill thinks she will come. Because the mother upstairs needs to see her. And to be forgiven for something.
Banter, memory, idle quarrels, the nervousness of an impending death hang over them. But so does memory, so the great room swirls round and back twenty years to a tidy kitchen where the matriarch, neat and queenly and determined, is drilling the four little girls in their Andrews Sisters harmonies and bewailing the cancellation of a gig at St Bartholomews by some straitlaced congregants who find this saucy American stuff a bit much.
It’s perfect: the little girls’ evocation of that decorously saucy showbiz, the mother bossing Joe the pianist, telling off passing lodgers and tolerating the chirpy local comic Jack (Bryan Dick a poundshop Dodd, whose magnificently terrible jokes repeatedly bring the house to hysteria: “I’ve got a new stepladder, I’m worried about how to introduce it to my real ladder”, etc).
Of course Jack promises ‘contacts’ in bigtime showbiz, and of course Veronica leaps at it. And one comes: Corey `Johnson is a smoothly dismissive Luther St John, allegedly Perry Como’s agent and early discoverer of Nat King Cole. He is interested in one of the girls. But only one. And maybe there’s a better acoustic to audition her in a private room . Upstairs. And Veronica is worried, as Joan is only fifteen. And decent Joe the pianist is worried. But Veronica suppresses her worry. And Joe goes, muttering that God forgive her.
Time sees the scene revolve to and fro from the battered old front room to the bygone kitchen. Joan comes home, and the whole story of longing and guilt unfolds. At times the later scenes between the sisters lag a little, unusual in anything directed by Sam Mendes, and make you long at moments for an Arthur-Miller explosive tragic ending. But Butterworth gives us something else valuable, in an unexpected development a demonstration of the pure messiness of life and the slanting, skewed diversity of what each of the sisters needs as a resolution.
It’s a majestic evening, often funny but full and satisfying, a massive cast of 21 – some characters recklessly thrown away, though each one makes the best of it . Donnelly shines, and all the adult sisters are finely realized, especially Helena Wilson’s nervy virginal Jill. The young versions are perfect too, and musically fabulous in their terrible postwar routines (respect to the costume team).
hillsofcaliforniaplay.com. to 15 June
Rating 4
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