Cosmopolitan Players Blue Remembered Hills

 Image Credit:  Cosmopolitan Players/Carriagework Theatre

(http://www.leeds.gov.uk/carriageworks)

Cosmopolitan Players produced an amateur production of Dennis Potter's Blue Remembered Hills set in the Forest of Dean, where the author hailed from, the play is about a group of  seven seven-years-olds playing in 1943 - the height of the Second World War.

The children are played by adults which Potter originally used as a dramatic device when the play was first broadcasted by the BBC in 1979.  Using this device offers scope how the children are really feeling emotively during their play and interaction with their peers.

There appears to be a care-free innocence among the group of children during the play's narration with imaginative games and play in the great outdoors.  They are oblivious though aware of the war's realities such as the air raids especially when Angela said to others that they should be at home when a raid happens.  The innocence and the care free days are suddenly ended with consequences which they have to live with for rest of their lives.

The play sums this in the end echoing words in vein of A.E. Houseman's words in A Shropshire Lad (40th poem).

"Into my heart an air that kills

From yon far country blows:

What are those blue remembered hills,

What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,

I see it shining plain,

The happy highways where I went

And cannot come again!" 

Cosmopolitan Players give an intimate heartfelt rendition of Potter's Blue Remembered Hills under the direction and production of Lara Woodhouse and Carolyn Craven.  An excellent play for one to see the world from a child's perspective as well as an adult one.  Blue Remembered Hills is at the Carriageworks until 14th February 2015.