Jez Butterworth How working with disgraced Weinstein haunted playwright

He has built a reputation as one of Britain's most H revered modern playwrights, but Jez Butterworth's career in film has evidently inspired the subjects he's now willing to take on.

- Nadia Khomami

The dramatist was 29 when he worked with the now-disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein on the 2001 erotic thriller The Birthday Girl, and it's clear the experience has continued to haunt him.

Butterworth's highly anticipated new play The Hills of California his first in seven years - is a multilayered, post-#MeToo story about grief, trauma and the trials women are forced to endure to realise their dreams. Set in a Blackpool boarding house during the summer heatwave of 1976, it tells the story of the Webb sisters, who reunite at the deathbed of their mother, Veronica. While awaiting the arrival of their fourth sister, Joan, who left for California 20 years ago, the women begin to piece together what defined their teenage lives.

The show then jumps back to 1955, and we learn how their widowed mother had obsessively trained them as a singing group akin to the Andrews Sisters in the hope of fame and success, and how a fateful run-in with a predatory American agent extinguished the spark within Joan and - in ways both direct and incidental - marred all of their lives thereafter.

Such incidents are what Butterworth has called "bleak but commonplace". "My very early experiences in the film business were with Miramax, specifically Harvey Weinstein," he told BBC Radio 4's Front Row this week. "It became clear, very quickly, these were the rules of the game. I was meeting actresses in California who wanted to do my film but would not talk to me because they'd had encounters with him." During a brawl, Butterworth once punched Weinstein after the decades, whose singular talents you have taken advantage of, whose dreams you have decisively and for ever defined".