Response Phase - This term we studied a play, originally written for television, called Blue Remembered Hills by Dennis Potter.

Response Phase

This term we studied a play, originally written for television, called Blue Remembered Hills by Dennis Potter. It is described as a “deceptively simple tale”, the reason for this is that although the plot appears to show the events of seven West-Country seven year olds on a summer afternoon during the Second World War it holds a completely different underlying meaning. Over the course of the play the children play and fight as seven year olds do. However Dennis Potter insisted that the seven year olds be played by adults. His reason for this was that he wanted his audience to realise the true realities of childhood are not “transparent with innocence”, which he said himself. He didn’t want the audience to react to two girls playing with doll with an indulgent “ah!” he did not want people to see the adorable and seemingly innocent side to childhood. From his own experiences he understood that he had some of the same feelings that he once had a child. He recalls that when walking alone in the “wrong parts” of New York he felt “almost exactly the same fear that I had felt four decades earlier” when he had been “waylaid by one particular bully in the high hedge lanes”. He says that he “did not want these, or any other, emotions to be distanced by the presence of young limbs, fresh eyes. And falsetto voices”. He wanted his audience to be able to feel some sort of resemblance between their own feelings and those of the characters in the play and these emotions were not all innocent ones. Another reason he chose adults was because he wanted his audience to see how children really played, as they subtly alter their behaviour when they are being watched by adults.