Blue Remembered Hills is the powerful television play by Dennis Potter that became a standard GCSE drama text.

Often compared to William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, it tells the tale of a group of children who, on a day of freedom in the Forest of Dean, commit a terrible and tragic act.

The play, first broadcast in 1979, is the chosen work for The University of Huddersfield Drama Society’s forthcoming production at the Lawrence Batley Theatre.

Society president Rory Capel, an events management undergraduate, says the production, unusual in that it features an entire cast of children all played by adults, is one that he had seen before but never performed.

“It’s a really energetic play and quite a challenge to perform,” he says. “We are adults but acting as kids. Because we’re students, it kind of makes sense.

“The dialogue is funny although not the easiest to follow (Potter, who was from the Forest of Dean, wrote it in Gloucestershire dialect) and at the beginning you don’t think things are going to get quite as dark as they do. There’s a surprise.”

The university’s drama group was founded less than five years ago and this is its first major production at the LBT. All the members are students or affiliated to the Students’ Union.

Blue Remembered Hills - named after a poem in A E Housman’s 1896 collection A Shropshire Lad - examines the themes of perceived childhood innocence, cruelty and morality. Potter himself said: ”When we dream of childhood we take our present selves with us. It is not the adult world writ small; childhood is the adult world writ large.” He viewed childhood as ‘adult society without all the conventions and the polite forms which overlay it’.

The original 1970s television play had an all-star cast that included Helen Mirren, Robin Ellis (famed for his earlier portrayal of Poldark), John Bird and Michael Elphick. It followed Potter’s critically-acclaimed drama series Pennies from Heaven but preceded his equally-famous Singing Detective.

Blue Remembered Hills is a reminder that the balance between adulthood and childhood and our control over morality and rationality is more fragile than we think.

Tickets for the play - on Wednesday and Thursday, March 16 and 17 - are £10 from 01484 430528 or www.thelbt.org.uk