Director Sam Mendes and playwright Jez Butterworth were friends for 30 years before they got around to collaborating. The result, The Ferryman, won them both 2017 Olivier Awards in England and 2018 Tony Awards here. Their sequel, The Hills of California, bodes even better.
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“I do, unconditionally, love Jez’s writing—even in his minor plays,” Mendes tells Observer. “I love the worlds that he inhabits, the way he tells stories. We had a great experience doing The Ferryman, and I told him, ‘Listen, when you write your next play, please send it to me.”
Butterworth did just that—in installments. “He sent me Act I,” says Mendes, who suggested a reading of the work in progress. “Because I know his hearing the readings gets him to carrying on with the writing. Straightaway, it was just magic.” The story was set in Blackpool, England, where four teenaged sisters are pushed by their mother to replicate the sound of the Andrews Sisters, and that first act unfolded in both 1955 and 1976, so some of the same characters appeared as their younger and older selves. “I liked the fact that, for the first time, he was making a play that existed on two timescales and not just in one room,” says Mendes. “It was two parts of the play, talking to each other.”
Mendes liked it so much, in fact, that he was on board as director from the moment of the reading of that first act. “I said, ‘Yeah, I’m in. I’d like to........