Blue Remembered Hills

Blue Remembered Hills was initially broadcast on BBC as a TV production in 1979 by Dennis Potter. The basic story line is about a group of seven seven-year-old children (who are played by adults) playing in the West Country woods in the summer of 1943. The play shows how they find out, through experience, that they are not such innocent children.

When we first read through the script, my initial reaction was that the play was slightly dull, I think this was because we were told that we would have to eventually speak in a West Country accent. This made some of the lines in the script such as “if’n we”, “‘ood go” and “I byunt” very difficult for some people to say. Another complication was that words for Italians were called “Ities” or “Wops”. This confused some people and made it more difficult to understand the script. Also at this time, we didn’t have any idea or background to any of the characters, so it was difficult to see the statuses in the group and therefore have any opinions about any of the characters.

However, there were parts in the script that I liked, and my favourite scene was the one where Donald, Angela and Audrey were playing mums and dads in the barn. I liked this scene at the start because it showed innocent child’s play and gave a good example of how seven-year olds have their own status order and how they react to one another. This scene was a good example of the relationship between Angela and Audrey, even if they were mean to Donald towards the end.

To me, the script also seemed quite sinister, even though it was about a group of na�ve, innocent children. This was because when Donald dies at the end, the group lie about having anything to do with it, even though it was their fault. To me, this was a bit of an anticlimax. I noticed that this end scene also made a parallel with the scene where the boys kill the squirrel towards the start of the play. These corresponding scenes show that it is one bad thing to kill a squirrel, but to take a persons life is on a whole other level.

At this point my favourite character was Donald. I think that was because it is easy to feel sorry for him as the fact that he is abused is made very apparent throughout the play. It is also to sympathise with him because he is an outsider in the group and nobody is ever really nice to him. Also, after reading the script and after reading about the fateful end of Donald, it is easy to feel apprehensive and scared for him.

After we read the script we made character brainstorms to help us understand the characters we would be playing. This is what we came up with:

I think making these brainstorms helped us, especially when we knew exactly which character we would be playing.

After reading the script, we started to do some exercises to get into the body style, and mindset of a seven-year old.

We talked as a group about how different a seven-year old sits, and moves around compared to us as teenagers. We explored sitting down like children, and we noticed how young children rock around and never sit still. When we were acting as children, it was important to have lots of energy and never stop fidgeting!

I tried rocking backwards and forwards and stretching my feet out in front of me. I also made sure that my hands were never still and I was never just staring into space. This was a lot harder to keep up than it sounds!

Another lesson we explored further into the persona of a seven-year old, and made dens!

The whole mood in our group shifted from being tired-morning-affected teenagers, to excitable seven-year olds! When we spoke (or rather yelled at each other), we spoke in a babyish, more high pitched voice. When we moved around the room, we were running or skipping and when we were making our dens, we had no plan and we just made it!

The amount of energy we had was so different from our usual selves and soon the competition between the groups had us shouting at each other “Our den is better that yours!” “No it’s not, we’ve got a slide!” etc. We also started destroying each others dens and stealing tent pegs! Even though everybody was getting involved, the boys were more competitive and physical, whereas the girls were just screaming and giggling! I think this exercise really helped us to get the energy level of a seven-year old, and it was also really fun!

In another lesson we made small scenes in groups about seven-year olds. Our group made up one where we were in typical teenager stereotype groups: geeks, active boys and popular girls, but we changed the scenario so we were seven. Bee and I were the popular girls and instead of being horrible and snobby, we giggled at Clemmie and Kath, who were the geeks. To seem like seven-year olds, Bee and I held hands all the time, skipped to where we wanted to go and spoke in a higher tone of voice. Another childish element we used was when we were sitting on the carpet, the boys were teasing Bee and I and pulling our hair. We also said in a childish, high pitched voice “Good morning Mrs Norfolk!” Our play wasn’t particularly serious even though we all held hands at the end and said in seven-year old voices “The morale of the story is to always be yourself!” But we all had fun performing it.

We also used the stage to show the statuses of the groups:

Another lesson we found out our parts and started to explore our characters. We drew around each others bodies and did a sort of character brainstorm. Inside our character we wrote words or phrases of what we thought if our character, the other people wrote around the outside of what other people thought of that character. I was Angela and my brainstorm looked a bit like this:

I think this exercise helped us understand not only what we thought of our character, but what others thought of our character too. This was very helpful when we started rehearsing because it was easier to react to other characters when we knew what they thought of our character.

In the next lesson, we looked at the statuses and roles of our characters within the group. We played a status game where a card was taped to our head (one being the lowest status and king being the highest). We had to treat and react to the other people by looking at their card. Then at the end of the time we had, we had to put ourselves in status order. I think our group did pretty well, and it gave me ideas of how to react to characters with a higher status that mine in the script.

We also read through our scripts and numbered the lines using a status technique. For example, one of my lines was “I want to go home! I want to go ho-o-me!” At this point, my character had a lower status, and we showed this on our scripts with arrows pointing up or down. We also looked at point of very high status, Johns first line “Keep our eyes skinned. That’s what we’ll have to do,” and very low status, Audrey’s line “Him won’t hurt us, will he?”

We also ranked the characters in our group in status order. This is what we decided:

(From highest to lowest status) Peter, John, Willie, Audrey, Angela and Raymond, although we found that this order changes at different points throughout the play. One example of status changing with my character is at the end of the play where Angela comes up with the idea of pretending that they had nothing to do with the death of Donald, “Well, we were! Hiding in the trees, weren’t we?”