Meet Laura Donnelly: Jez Butterworth’s leading lady and star of West End smash The Hills of California
Laura Donnelly didn’t finish work until late last night. That’s because her partner, Tony winner Jez Butterworth, has written a three-hour play, and she’s in it. Does she ever tell him off for making them so long? The Belfast-born star, cradling a coffee in the Ham Yard Hotel’s conservatory, lets out a long, languorous chuckle. “I did, literally the other night. I was like, can the next one be 80 minutes please?”
The play is The Hills of California, and it’s an event. Butterworth is frequently cited as Britain’s leading playwright, his 2009 play Jerusalem theatre’s defining 21st-century work; Donnelly has been the hypnotic, tender heart of his stage writing since 2012. That was the year they met and fell in love. She had been cast in The River, which was more of a spell than a play, and saw Dominic West (and later, on Broadway, Hugh Jackman) gut a real fish on stage.
In his next play, in 2017, Butterworth took a piece of Donnelly’s family history – the IRA “disappearing” of her uncle in 1981 – as inspiration for , a muscular epic full of violence and foreboding, which became the Royal Court’s fastest selling, directed, like , by Sam Mendes. The reviews have, by and large, been very positive, with words like “masterclass” and “masterpiece” bandied about.
