Adults chase squirrels, play house and run around like soldiers, but there is more to Blue Remembered Hills than grown-ups pretending to be kids - it reveals the raw humanity of our own grown-up world.

The drama remains one of Dennis Potter's best-known plays. Set in wartime Britain, it tells the story of a "golden day" that turns to tragedy.

Director Cheryl Brown says: "Blue Remembered Hills is extremely funny and their costumes and West Country accents are rather charming, but there's nothing cute about this production.

"From your vantage point in the studio, the girls will show you a glimpse of the gossipy, competitive tensions between the mothers of the village while the boys echo the hierarchy, exclusion and confusion faced by their fathers in the adult playgrounds of the Second World War."

It is a story about childhood, inspired by the 1896 poem Into My Heart An Air That Kills by AE Housman. The poem is about lost childhood and was born out of the troubles Housman suffered, ending with the lines: "That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain, The happy highways where I went, and cannot come again."

The poem proved ideal material for Potter, known for his love of gritty realism.

At the time of writing the play, he said he wanted to create "a magnifying glass to show what it's like to be a child", adding: "Childhood is adult society without all the conventions and the polite forms which overlay it."

It's 1943 on a summer's afternoon and seven children play in the fields and woods of the West Country. The children, each with different fears and temperaments, tease, play and argue. Theirs is an innocent world which comes tumbling down in an awful climax.

"The challenge is working out where the child stops and the adult starts," says Cheryl. "It's easy to assume that kids are unsophisticated and that they'd be fairly straightforward to play.

"But, and this isn't news to those of you with children of your own, it turns out they're filled with just as much excitement, anxiety, joy and pain as their parents and are even more complicated.

"Except, in the case of our pint-sized characters, these fully-grown emotions have an intensity which comes from being housed within 3ft-tall Energizer bunnies.

"In one page of script our actors have to go from frustrated tears and the fear of being bullied to pant-wetting hilarity, with barely time to pause for breath as they tear around the stage, jumping, fighting, sulking and rolling on the floor with laughter."

The play was written for TV and was first broadcast in 1979, with Helen Mirren and Michael Elphick among its stars.

Cheryl says: "This play has really caught the imagination of the cast and crew. If you've seen Blue Remembered Hills on TV, then why not take a look at what we've done with it? If it's a new play for you, then I urge you to come and see what all the fuss is about."

Starts 7.45pm, plus 2pm Sunday. No evening show Sun and Mon. Tickets cost £7-£8.50. Call 01273 746118.