Sense of play: The dramas of Jez Butterworth

By Kyle C. Frisina, Dramaturg

Playwright Jez Butterworth’s characters are out to convince us why they’re right, what needs to change, how the world ought to be. In Tony Award-winning plays like Jerusalem and The Ferryman, and acclaimed films like Black Mass and Ford v. Ferrari, his characters are always fighting to be heard; and the woman at the center of The Hills of California, the extraordinary Veronica Webb, is perhaps the crowning example of Butterworth’s persuasive art.

Butterworth himself is a convincing character. As an undistinguished secondary school student, he talked his way into Cambridge University and then into being allowed to do little else while enrolled but make theatre. Across his work, investment in the possibility of persuasion adds up to a stirring endorsement of human agency, even for characters in dire circumstances. For his part, Butterworth finds agency, as well as communion, in the act of making theatre.

“If I get this right, and I try hard enough, and I’m brave about it,” he says, “I’m going to be able to access something which is going to be of importance to the actors first of all, and then to the audience.”

The Hills of California — which draws from the writer’s own experience with the protracted death of a sister — is one of several plays by Butterworth to be inspired by history. His first play, the smash success Mojo (1995), was cued by the overlap between the criminal world and the world of pop music, telling the grisly, testosterone-fueled story of would-be Soho gangsters in the late 1950s who believe they’ve discovered the next Elvis Presley. Another pair of plays followed: The Night Heron (2002), set in the Cambridgeshire Fens, a marshy region in eastern England, and The Winterling (2006), which takes place in rural Devon. (The latter was heavily influenced by the playwright’s close friend and mentor Harold Pinter, whose work continues to inform Butterworth’s writing life.) Like The Hills of California, all three plays feature working class characters who are defiantly eloquent and filled with longing. They also showcase Butterworth’s lifelong interest in what links people to their social surroundings and to the natural world. Throughout his career, the British playwright has maintained close connections to American theatre with several of his plays, including Parlour Song (2008), receiving world premieres off-Broadway at the Atlantic Theater.

As a dramatist, Butterworth remains best known for Jerusalem, his 2009 play featuring the audacious Johnny “Rooster” Byron. A myth-obsessed iconoclast raging against a changing world, Rooster hauls audiences with him as he protests his eviction from a rural wood set to be razed for new housing. Butterworth followed the riotous Jerusalem with a far more intimate work, the lyrical threehander The River (2012), concerned in a different way with the delusions of myth. His final play to reach the stage before The Hills of California was The Ferryman (2017). The historical germ of that aching family tragedy, set in Northern Ireland, came from Butterworth’s wife, whose uncle was disappeared during the Troubles. Notably, The Ferryman marked an important shift in Butterworth’s writing from plays authored primarily for male actors to those featuring strong female leads.

While Butterworth rightly claims that you couldn’t “walk a character out of one play and stick them in another,” so dissimilar are his dramas, additional commonalities abound in his work. As audiences will encounter in The Hills of California, many of Butterworth’s plays contain alternating moments of horror and grace. The second act of an early play opens with a young man strung upside down by his feet, while several dramas feature characters who literally beg for their lives. Yet the same plays also include moments of care so tender they might break your heart, as when one character tells a friend being harassed for a crime he may not have committed:

“You’re a good man... I believe you... Do you believe me? Do you believe me as I believe you?”

Balancing such contradictory tones requires deft pacing, which Butterworth frequently handles by structuring his plays to unfold over just a day or two. The Hills of California is no exception, with the twist that the action of this play takes place in two periods: 1955 and 1976. As a result, we are forced to grapple with a vision of the past that is repeatedly revised by the present. At the same time, we must also revise our understanding of the present in light of new possible truths that emerge from the past. Butterworth believes audiences are up to the challenge: “The best thing that can happen,” he says, “is that the play plots against you. It hoodwinks you. My plays aren’t intent on making things clear.”

For all its continuity with Butterworth’s earlier work, The Hills of California also marks several departures. In the first place, it revolves entirely around women’s experiences. Together, Veronica Webb and her four daughters offer audiences a multi-dimensional portrait of the social and economic options available to women in the third quarter of the twentieth century. Importantly, Butterworth gives these characters generous space to demonstrate how their individual sensibilities may chafe at or thrive within these circumstances: indeed, each woman in Hills is more complex than the last.

Perhaps most distinct within Butterworth’s oeuvre is The Hills of California’s focus on how, for all their convincing powers, different characters can remain fundamentally far apart in their understanding of the same events. In fact, their particular gifts and burdens may not just enable but require this. The play asks what, for many of us, are destabilizing questions: is it possible to come to a common interpretation across generations and between siblings? And, even more radically, is common interpretation truly necessary to the work of living on together in a family? Without a shared understanding of the past, of course, we might fairly wonder what is left to us. As this utterly glorious play reveals, what’s left is the ongoing (and, in Butterworth’s hands, the highly theatrical) attempt to engage with and make space for one another anyway. If we come to realize, along with Veronica’s daughters, that this is the only available future, can we convince ourselves to make that future our own?