Perhaps Potter's most autobiographical play, BLUE REMEMBERED HILLS follows a group of seven-year-old children as they explore the adultless countryside during the wartime summer of 1943. As the games the group play unfold, cliques form, and the stakes grow ever more dire. Potter’s own upbringing in the rural and remote Forest of Dean was a huge influence on his work, and here he uses the landscape and dialect of his native region to emphasize the hermetic nature of childhood worlds — worlds that can be more brutal and unforgiving than the adult one. Featuring adult actors playing children way before CLIFFORD and THE REHEARSAL (including Helen Mirren, the star of the same year’s CALIGULA), BLUE REMEMBERED HILLS feels like a spiritual ancestor to Michael Haneke’s THE WHITE RIBBON in anatomizing breakdown of society from the bottom up.