Reviews

The Daily Telegraph


Across the park at the Chichester Festival Theatre, a small boy in long shorts zooms and divebombs his way towards a barnlike structure of wood and tarpaulin. As he approaches, it becomes clear that he is not a child, but an adult actor, and the barn towards which he is making his erratic progress is the Festival Theatre’s pop-up performance space, The Theatre on the Fly.

Inside the temporary structure, a stage of bare earth is bounded on each side by old-fashioned wooden climbing frames. A forest of bright blue scaffolding poles rises from the earth, and instead of a backdrop, the audience looks out through vast barn doors onto the park beyond, where dogs race among the distant trees.

The Theatre provides a summer home for three productions by young directors who trained at the Chichester Festival Theatre. The first of these is Dennis Potter’s Blue Remembered Hills, directed by Anna Ledwich. Potter’s play, which takes its title from AE Housman’s A Shropshire Lad, was originally written for television and later adapted for the theatre. It is set in the Forest of Dean in 1943, where a group of seven-year-olds bicker and play among the trees on a summer afternoon.

The roles of the six children are taken by adult actors, a shockingly simple device that lends a disturbing resonance to their shifting alliances, in which the adult world is unsettlingly reflected and prefigured.

As devices go, it is utterly unforgiving, as is the dense Gloucestershire dialect in which the play is written. Anything less than pitch-perfect direction and performances would be ruinous to its atmosphere of darkly compromised nostalgia.

But Anna Ledwich’s production achieves an ideal fusion of design, direction and performance. The cast, including Gary Beadle as the bullying Peter, Leila Farzad as the precocious minx Angela, and Laura Rogers as her sidekick, Audrey, is uniformly excellent, and Gregory Gudgeon as the hapless victim Donald is so convincing that a woman in the audience behind me was heard to murmur, “Poor little boy”.

The door-framed vista of the park lends a particular enchantment to this magical production, and Ledwich uses the space with dazzling ingenuity, particularly in the tragic final scene.

It is particularly unfortunate that the play’s shocking climax should coincide with the interval at the main theatre, so that Ryan Early’s beautiful concluding rendition of Houseman’s lines has to compete with the sound of Chichester theatregoers in full cry.