Blue Remembered Hills

Mini Festival 2010

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Our Mini Festival in 2010 was entirely unique. Not only was the play acted by adults playing wartime school children, but the entire performance was put on in the open air.

The play concerns a group of silly seven year olds playing in the Forest of Dean one summer afternoon during 1943. It displays how victimisation and stereotypical views occur even in young children, and ends abruptly when the character of “Donald” is burned to death as a result of the other children’s actions. The play, despite seeming very frivolous (bar the final scene) on first reading, is in fact reflecting on the human capability for brutality, especially in children, and is in a similar vein to William Golding’s The Lord of The Flies.

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.