Lewes Little Theatre - Blue Remembered Hills

Dennis Potter's Blue Remembered Hills first appeared in 1979 as a BAFTA award-winning TV play starring Helen Mirren. It is now a staple choice for the stage. This month you can see it at Lewes Little Theatre in their latest production, directed by Newell Fisher. Mirren was thirty-four when she appeared in the TV hit, although her character, Angela, was only a child. This was not a reflection of Mirren's unusually youthful looks, (actually all of the characters are children played by adult actors), but a deliberate device to communicate the play's preoccupation with the theme of childhood. "When we dream of childhood," said Dennis Potter, "we take our present selves with us. It is not the adult world writ small; childhood is the adult world writ large."

The play is, as Potter himself confirmed, “by far the simplest of all that I have written, in both form and content”. On a sunny summer's day in England 1943, seven West Country 'children' play in the Forest of Dean. With echoes of Golding's Lord of the Flies, the 'innocence' of childhood is challenged by a course of events which leads inevitably towards tragedy. Although bleak in the end, audiences have also found warmth, and even Potter reportedly admitted that somewhere within him there might be a much more wholesome writer than he had led people to believe. The title comes from AE Housman's 'Into my heart an air that kills', an ode to lost childhood (which in the filmic version, Potter himself recites at the end of the play). ER