THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
By Jez Butterworth
Harold Pinter Theatre, Panton St, London SW1Y 4DN, until 16 June 2024
Following their triumph in the West End and Broadway with The Ferryman writer Jez Butterworth and director Sam Mendes have done it again. I can’t imagine there will be a better play this season and as he did with Jerusalem and The Ferryman Butterworth has added a new work to the canon which will linger long in the memory of audiences.
It’s a perfect drama about lost dreams and the need to let go of them, about life’s compromises, bad parenting and how the past inhabits the present. It has the texture and span of a great novel and a shimmering poetry and bittersweet dialogue that cuts like a knife. Like that other memory play Dancing at Lughnasa it is steeped in music, in this case Johnny Mercer and the songs of the Andrews Sisters, whose heartache never tilts over into sentimentality. Instead, they unlock memory.
We’re in Blackpool in the sweltering heatwave of the summer of 1976 when tarmac melted as well as the ice creams. We’re in the rather forlorn Seaview Guesthouse (Rob Howell’s set is huge and magnificently gloomy), where there’s no view of the sea as it’s well back. The guest house has seen better days, and we see three daughters gathering while the owner, their mother, lies dying, and unseen, upstairs. Anyone who has lived through similar vigils will recognize the competing emotions here – fond memories, buried resentments reawakened and that dark humor which seeps out at funerals, mainly resulting from the family members’ lack of sleep.
Helena Wilson’s Jill, the one who stayed behind, is a meek ‘spinster’ as they would have called her. Her polar opposite is Leanne Best’s Gloria, a firebrand, caked in bitterness and disappointment. Finally there’s Ophelia Lovibond’s Ruby who still works her great allure but excels in sarcasm. Both Gloria and Ruby are stuck in dead end marriages with husbands who Butterworth lends agency to as characters in their own right. The detailing that Mendes weaves for each character - there are no small parts - is an object lesson in great directing.
Suddenly we’re pitched back 20 years and we’re on the other side of the curtain that divides the ‘public parlour’ from the bustling kitchen. We meet the younger incarnations of the sisters, superbly played by Nancy Allsop, Sophia Ally, Lara McDonnell and Nicola Turne. They are recreating an Andrews Sisters routine. In between dominating the paying guests and hapless men whose hands might wander, mother is drilling her girls in close harmony singing with a fearsomeness that would make Mama Rose blush.
Laura Donnelly is astonishing as the mother, Veronica, a woman of iron resolve who is blind to the damage she’s causing. Her ambition is to get them to the London Palladium and she has them perform for a visiting American agent. But, she’s already behind the times, not having noticed who Elvis was. He meanwhile takes a shine to Joan, the eldest and most precocious daughter. He asks that she sing ‘privately’ for him in one of the rooms. Joan jumps at the chance and Veronica reluctantly complies, but it’s a decision that will rip the family apart. The play explores to what extent Veronica is culpable here and how she can’t rein in her ambition for the girls, but Butterworth rightly lets us work that out for ourselves.
In the final act we get to meet the adult Joan, also played brilliantly by Donnelly. She has spent the intervening 20 years as a faded rock chick in California. The sisters’ responses to her return run the gamut from joy, to fury, to excitable hyperventilation, the latter in the case of Ruby, whose self-control withers away when faced with the reality of what she’d fantasized about.
It’s stirring stuff, utterly compelling throughout and performed with a cast whose performances are like stones in a precious mosaic, all of which have been perfectly polished by Mendes.
The dialogue is so good you will want to own the script, and the experience so enriching you’ll want to go back.
