AS Lit: Blue Remembered Hills

An extract from 'Potter on Potter', edited by Graham Fuller (faber and faber 1993):

'I was trying to avoid twee and coy responses - 'Ah, look at those children.' If you are seven and the bully is seven, then it's as bad, as terrifying, as being mugged on the street as an adult. If you saw two child actors doing it it could still be terrifying, but there is something that distances you from it, and you say, 'That is what children are like.' Whereas if it's two adults it's so close to what adults actually do do. You just add the fidgets and the constant movement of children.

Blue Remembered Hills was the first time that I couldn't allow myself long speeches - because children don't speak that way - or consecutive thought, in the A-B-C-D-E sense, because children don't think that way. The constant switches of their attention meant that it was the most straightforward, the most apparently naturalistic play I'd done - except that it was played by adults.

The odd thing was that the first few minutes of it were terrifying for me because I wondered if it was going to work! When Colin Welland comes charging out of that field, splashing into a puddle, making aeroplane noises and crashing, it could have been the most embarrassing thing ever. I think most audiences start thinking of the characters as children about five minutes into it. And yet at the same time you're looking at adults, and you know you're looking at adults, so you see the double bounce. Why do people often say, 'I dreamt I was back in school'? It's a version of a nightmare - a recurring one for some people, thought not for me, thank God. But I have often heard it said, and I have often rad that people frequently, when anxious, draem of their schooldays, of their teacher's question, to which they don't know the answer...

So there is such a balance in our own selves. Obviously the child is father to the man, and obviously we carry our childhoods within us. That goes without saying. But to see those little hierachies, that competitiveness, those casual brutalities physically dramatised by adult bodies, that was what I was after - and the sudden tenderness: they cry about the squirrel they've stoned to death, or at least one of them starts crying and the others get embarrassed and they start shuffling about. They deal with their emotions in a very English way, by turning upon the one who causes them discomfort. but the other thing, of course, is that the English are very skilled at repressing emotion, which children aren't, not in quite the same way, and certainly not primary school children. You've just got to look at  a playground.'