The Hills of California

'This house. It's called "Sea View". It's just I've looked out of every window, and you can't. You can't see the sea.'

Blackpool, 1976. The driest summer in two hundred years. The beaches are packed. The hotels are heaving. In the sweltering backstreets, far from the choc ices and donkey rides, the Webb Sisters are returning to their mother's run-down guest house, as she lies dying upstairs.

Jez Butterworth's play The Hills of California was first performed at the Harold Pinter Theatre in London's West End in 2024, directed by Sam Mendes, and produced by Sonia Friedman Productions and Neal Street.

'Magnificent, moving and quietly furious… a rich, funny, brilliantly layered drama about lost dreams, trampled hopes, parenting and letting go'— Financial Times

'A remarkable play... unfurls with the richness and depth of a well-crafted novel... Butterworth remains a one-off, a man who can write plays about ordinary people that carry the charge of the great tragedies'— Time Out

'A strange and enthralling family saga, packed with warmth, hurt and rich texture... on a par with Butterworth's Jerusalem and The Ferryman – a trio of flawed masterpieces'— Evening Standard

'Exquisite... Devastatingly moving, bitterly funny, tender, cruel and wise'— The Stage

'Rich, vivid and compelling... the West End is infinitely the richer for its presence'— iNews

'Beautifully well-written... Filled with believable, colourful characters... expertly engineered... a rich text, full of nuance and glorious dialogue'— Express

'Intelligent, witty and studded with good lines, fine performances, resonances, echoes and a lingering sense of loss'— Sunday Times

'Magnificent, moving and quietly furious… a rich, funny, brilliantly layered drama about lost dreams, trampled hopes, parenting and letting go'

'A remarkable play... unfurls with the richness and depth of a well-crafted novel... Butterworth remains a one-off, a man who can write plays about ordinary people that carry the charge of the great tragedies'

'A strange and enthralling family saga, packed with warmth, hurt and rich texture... on a par with Butterworth's Jerusalem and The Ferryman – a trio of flawed masterpieces'

'Exquisite... Devastatingly moving, bitterly funny, tender, cruel and wise'

'Rich, vivid and compelling... the West End is infinitely the richer for its presence'

'Beautifully well-written... Filled with believable, colourful characters... expertly engineered... a rich text, full of nuance and glorious dialogue'

'Intelligent, witty and studded with good lines, fine performances, resonances, echoes and a lingering sense of loss'

'Epic and ambitious... The writing is closely observed, humorous, but with ripples of anger beneath the surface'

'Bittersweet and bitingly funny... Butterworth's poetic verbosity is in full evidence, along with savage humour, painful pathos and simmering rage... thought-provoking, heartbreaking and multi-layered'

'It's smart, ambitious fare, and the dialogue displays Butterworth's usual élan'

'Perfect... mournfully entertaining, dramatically intense... a majestic evening, often funny but full and satisfying'

'A masterclass... a play that taps right into the heart of the grieving process and gives you raw, unabashed truths about how families treat one another'

'A new masterpiece'

'Astute and compelling... an imperfect masterpiece... Butterworth reminds us of his singular ability to take us deep inside a seemingly mundane microcosm, and make shatteringly astute observations about family dynamics, unreliable memories, sexual politics and then some... undoubtedly one of the most brilliant works you'll see on stage this year'

'A major event in theatre... Butterworth's dialogue merges the lyrical and the earthy, threaded together by strong, dark humour'

'Relentlessly entertaining... drops you deep into the devastations of time and lifts you gently into the consolations of song'

'Ambitious, captivating and richly rewarding'

'This is wide-scoped and complicated storytelling... Butterworth's writing rewards the effort. The Hills of California is often very funny, but it has a core of deep regret that gets revealed as layers of family secrets are peeled away'

Jez Butterworth is one of the UK's leading playwrights. His plays include: Mojo (Royal Court Theatre, London, 1995; West End, 2013); The Night Heron (Royal Court, 2002); The Winterling (Royal Court, 2006); Parlour Song (Atlantic Theater, New York, 2008; Almeida Theatre, London, 2009); Jerusalem (Royal Court, 2009; West End, 2010; New York, 2011); The River (Royal Court, 2012); The Ferryman (Royal Court and West End, 2017) and The Hills of California (West End, 2024).Mojo won the George Devine Award, the Olivier Award for Best Comedy and the Writers' Guild, Critics' Circle and Evening Standard Awards for Most Promising Playwright. Jerusalem won the Best Play Award at the Critics' Circle, Evening Standard and WhatsOnStage.com Awards, and was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Play. The Ferryman won the Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best Play, and the Critics' Circle, Olivier and WhatsOnStage Awards for Best New Play, as well as the 2019 Tony Award for Best Play.His screenwriting credits include Fair Game (2010), Get On Up (2014), Edge of Tomorrow (2014), Black Mass (2015), Spectre (2015), Ford v Ferrari (2019), and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023).For TV, he created and wrote the comedy series Mammals for Amazon Studios, and created the historical fantasy drama Britannia for Sky and Amazon Prime.In 2007, he won the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2019 he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

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