A fine production of an extraordinary play

Much has recently been written about Dennis Potter and his Blue Remembered Hills, particularly with its recent and welcome airing on BBC television over Christmas. This is a Good Thing, since a reappraisal of Potter's work is overdue since his death in 1994.

Blue Remembered Hills is, in appearance, a play about and featuring children; in message, it is a comment on how the violence and wantonness with which adults treat each other. More, it has a message about nostalgia – an issue that relentlessly obsessed both the writer and his work – and particularly about how each of us views childhood and what life was like between the pram and puberty, from primary school to adulthood.

We adults forget just how supple children are, how uninhibited about and with their bodies, how much more physically and mentally agile and versatile they are compared to adults. This was one of the finest features of this excellent production of Dennis Potter's 1979 film, Blue Remembered Hills, in the author's own stage version of 1984.

But The Dukes' Artistic Director, Ian Hastings, has an unusually keen eye for detail, as I have noted in these columns, and others elsewhere. The physical and naïf energy of the direction was an excellent counterpoint to Potter's own wonderfully lucid dialogue. (This in itself is no mean achievement, as any writer will tell you: children talk differently from adults – shorter sentences, (usually) simpler words, sudden subject-shifts etc.)

The well-directed fights, too, added vitality and realism to the well-paced action. The rural-looking set, now woodland, now barn, now a clearing, was ingeniously designed, and the (adult) cast made full use of its possibilities.

"They're horrid – they don't have a life apart from each other,' said my colleague as the interval started. She was right …. "except ‘Donald Duck', and that's his great problem', she continued. She could have included the stammering Raymond, too. There's always at least one outcast in or around every gang (remember?) and, of course, in our own social and workplace circles too. Even politics, and national parliaments, have their own rebels/ dissidents/ loners/ idiomatic mysteries and outsiders.

In the light of this, then, bullying and power-group politics are inevitably a part of the drama in Blue Remembered Hills as they are in life, and always have been, everywhere. Nowhere was the sense of violence underplayed, and the short attention spans of Potter's ‘children' ensured changes in dramatic dynamics. Also, Hastings knows how to use silence to good effect.

In case this reads too heavily, you can be assured that there is plenty of humour in both the text and in this production. Visual antics, in line with the rich text, included playful jests, puppy fun, ironical posturing, swinging from tree to tree and carefree climbing. The excellent and well-chosen cast were more than equal to the demanding work this piece requires if it is to succeed.

And succeed it most certainly did. Visually, it was breathtaking. Emotionally, too, it was stunning. From beginning to end, from the opening silence finally broken by Willie ‘the zooming Spitfire' with his "waaaaaaoom vrooooaaaaaaaaak! (Imitating gunfire) at-atat-tat-tat-tat-tat!' all the way through to the last, strangulated "Poor old Quack Quack.' and a final reading of AE Housman's plaintive poem of the play's title, the audience was riveted.

Copyright © 6 February 2005 Michael Nunn

Michael is freelance journalist based in Lancaster.
He has been commissioned by The Dukes to write programme notes for this and other productions.

"It reminded me of so many things from my own childhood - it was funny and tragic and full of sharp insight. I'm really glad I went" -satori