Fifteen years after penning his mega-hit Jerusalem, Jez Butterworth has knocked out a new drama. The slightly baffling title, The Hills of California, refers to a hit by Johnny Mercer (the US songwriter not the MP for Plymouth) and it suggests American themes and locations. But the show is set in a knackered old Blackpool boarding house in the 1970s, where three sisters are waiting for their elderly mum to croak.

It takes an hour of chit-chat to explain what’s happening. When the sisters were little, their ambitious mother forced them to perform song-and-dance routines in the hope of launching them as kiddie superstars on the new medium of television. The eldest girl, Joan, quit the group at the age of 15 and fled to America to make it big. Now she’s on her way back to the musty hovel in Blackpool to give Mum a farewell hug. That’s the set-up.

A good playwright fights for the audience’s interest. Here, the audience fights to maintain interest

We then skip to the 1950s and watch the young quartet in the hands of their powerful mother (Laura Donnelly), who trains the girls with a loving but steely hand. She forces them to practise endlessly and she instils in them the emotional grit and discipline they’ll need to cope with life in showbiz. The characters in this play have evidently been shaped to suit contemporary tastes: all the women are smart, intrepid, adventurous, heroic, plucky and free-thinking. As for the men, they’re a bunch of nerds, predators and misfits.

The girls’ mother receives a visit from a mysterious promoter who manages Perry Como and claims to have discovered Nat King Cole. He wants to see the quartet in action, especially Joan, and he keeps dropping hints that he’s about to produce a big variety show in the West End. But does he want to make Joan a superstar or get her pregnant? These brief scenes are wonderfully tense and riveting. Edge-of-the-seat stuff.

We then return to the dreary 1970s where the bickering sisters and their useless, clod-hopping husbands are waiting for Joan to come back from America. What happened? Is she famous? Did she marry a billionaire? Finally, after a two-hour wait, she arrives like a replacement bus service; the thrill of her entrance is somewhat dampened by a sense of irritation that she took so long to get here.

Joan’s accent ought to be a fascinating mix of jerky Blackpool and the more liquidy cadences of California, but the voice-coach ducked the challenge and told her to drawl through her lines like a San Fran hippy chick. As for the plot, well, Joan delivers plenty of surprises but they’re not terribly exciting. Banal, you might call them. Butterworth has said that he’s too rich to care if this play makes any money or not. A dangerous admission. A good playwright is always fighting for the audience’s interest. Here, the audience is fighting to maintain its interest. By the way, the central action contains a remarkable tribute to the storyline in Arthur Miller’s early drama, The Man Who Had All The Luck. No one is suggesting that Butterworth is a copycat – but he’s mightily impressed by Miller.

The political chronicler Jonathan Maitland has turned his attention to Dr Feelgood’s guitarist, Wilko Johnson. The band came from Canvey Island and the press night was held in the welcoming splendours of the Queen’s Theatre, Hornchurch. Wilko played the instrument like no one else. Using his bare fingers, never a plectrum, he hammered the strings with a sweeping up-and-down washboard movement that enabled him to play rhythm and lead at the same.

The production shows him developing his habit of pointing his Telecaster into the crowd and pretending to strafe the fans with bullets. We get a few flashes of his cynical wit: ‘Kent is the garden of England and Essex is the patio.’ Wilko was kicked out of Dr Feelgood after a row over song lyrics and the band began to turn out chart hits and to attain a level of success that had previously eluded them.

Johnson Willis plays the lead with just the right sort of prickly attitude. Maitland’s script does nothing to soften Wilko’s hectoring and self-righteous nature. He was a literature graduate who later worked as a school teacher and his habit was to impart the finer points of English poetry by screaming at his pupils like a regimental sergeant-major. Being likeable never concerned him. We see him admitting an infidelity to his wife, who reacts with horror and fury. But he’s astounded that she doesn’t drop to her knees and praise his honesty.

Wilko was a rough, waspish, rootless poet of weirdness, and his character is brilliantly captured in this biopic. The play will do good business in Essex and in the eastern fringes of London. Hard to see much demand for it elsewhere. There’s always Japan where Wilko was, and is, huge.