Will Ramsay reviews Blue Remembered Hills 

Hull Daily Mail Friday 20th April 2012

The gap between the games of childhood and the grown-up world is Dennis Potter's play suggests, wafer thin.  It was a point made in the original TV drama, broadcast in 1979, in which an adult cast played a group of wartime children at play.

But in a clever prelude, Hull Playgoer's Society's production includes a new intro showing the children as grown-ups.  

Set 40 years on, in 1983, the opening scene shows that we might get older but the same traits that dogged us as children will lurk in us, no matter how hard we try to disguise them.

It is also a cunning way into the drama.  The surprise of seeing the adult cast squabbling, fighting and teasing as children lends a melancholy air to it all - we know where they are destined to end up.

Despite that though, or maybe, in part, because of it, it is a brutally funny play. No weakness is left unexplored by the cast as they vie for supremacy.

It is Danny Bradley's portrayal of Donald, the delicate bullied loner, that steals the show. He is a warning of the darker consequences of childish fun.

When and Where Tonight (Fri)  8pm; tomorrow 2.00 pm and 8 pm. Hull Truck Theatre, Ferensway. Tickets £8-£10 Call 01482 323638

Blue Remembered Hills Preview

18th - 21st April 2012 at Hull Truck Studio Theatre

Tale shows growing up's not child's play

Hull Daily Mail   9th April 2012                        By William Ramsay

They might well be seasoned actors – but next week they will be nothing more than a bunch of kids.

Hull Playgoers' Society is to stage Blue Remembered Hills, one of the sharpest, and funniest, plays about the pleasures and pains of childhood.

 Set in 1943, Dennis Potter's drama – first produced as a television play – follows a group of schoolchildren at play on a summer's afternoon.

Innocent it is not, though, as squabbles, and then something far darker, clouds their games.

"The danger could be that because it is young children, it might be tempting to portray them as rather sweet or in a sentimental way," said the director, Janet Musil.