On an idyllic summer afternoon in the summer of 1943, a group of children play in the West Country hills, fields and forests. With no adults around, they indulge in spontaneous games and horseplay - sometimes echoing the distant war, at other times revealing their own insecurities and petty vindictiveness.
Anyone else grow up reading Enid Blyton books? Those "Secret Seven" or "Famous Five" stories where young folks had some jolly japes, sometime tempered with a baddie and some ingenious traps and wheezes? I thought for a while that this is what we were going to get here as a collection of youths are p
... laying merrily in a forest in the middle of WWII. There's no sign of the atrocities of the war per se, here, but as the children play their dialogue and attitudes make it clear that their's isn't the innocence we might have initially expected. There are five boys and two girls and for just over an hour we watch their games become, well something just a bit more than that. The playful starts to become the serious, the fun more serious, the constraints of their age that ought to hem in their imagination become much more blurred - there is a realism to the behaviour that shouldn't be quite so prevalent - yet! As with any "tribe" there are leaders and followers, those who are bolder and those more timid - and writer Dennis Potter quite effectively imbues the characters with strengths and weakness that don't always conform to the stereotypes of the biggest, the oldest, or the girls being the "weaker". For me, Michael Elphick's "Peter" and Janine Duvitski's "Audrey" stood out as the complexities of their persona teased and terrorised, but Colin Welland and John Bird also added an huge amount richness to a story that ends up about as far away from Miss Blyton's idyll as it might be possible to imagine. It's frantic at times, the dialogue comes thick and fast and the story has a certain roundness to it that is anything but predictable. Is it wartime that is making those children grow up, is it nature, nurture - all three? It's entertaining, but in quite a provocative and lively manner and well worth an hour.
