Blue Remembered Hills, Headgate Theatre, Colchester.

IT'S rare to start off a review praising the set, but you didn’t just enter the Headgate for this production, you enter a forest!

Dennis Potter’s classic play is set in the Forest of Dean during World War Two, and the space was brilliantly transformed by Steve Dunt’s excellent design, it even smelt of grass and mud! Potter’s device uses adults to play children, and in doing so exposes the behaviour of adults, the lies, the shifting friendships, and, ultimately, the cover ups.

A group of seven years olds play in the forest one ordinary day in the summer of 1943, and the cast give the audience gleeful hints of what they may have been like when they were seven.

The tone is brilliantly set by the excellent Brian Malone as Willie and Kevin Topple as Peter, opening the play and quickly establishing the bully that Peter is. As other characters enter, a hierarchy begins to emerge, the jostle to be alpha male between Peter and John (Paul Reed), the cowboy and Indian fan Raymond, (Peter Schofield), and, much to the boys disgust, girls!

Danielle Tile was hugely convincing as Angela, forming a wonderful double act with Joanna Armitage’s Audrey.

But bottom of the food chain is poor, abused, Donald (Zach Miller), teased constantly by the others, beaten by his mum, his dad captured by the Japanese. In case you thought this was to be a sweet homily to days gone by, when kids really did play outside all day, Potter draws out the darkness in the comedy. The day turns to tragedy when Donald, in act of pyromania, sets fire to the barn and the others bolt him in, an innocent mistake, but they then agree to lie to cover their tracks.

Director Steve Dunt wisely let the adults be the characters rather then make them ‘play’ at being children and this is a hugely effective production. Some of the hair styles needed to be more firmly rooted in the FORTIES, the boys especially, and an unnecessary interval in such a short play interrupted the build up of tension. However, it was good to see this classic on stage.

PAUL T DAVIES