DENNIS Potter may have loved evocative songs, as we know from his television series Pennies From Heaven and The Singing Detective, but Blue Remembered Hills is not a musical, so how come York Musical Theatre Company were staging his shocking 1979 drama?

In 2013, the company took its first leap into straight drama by presenting Alan Ayckbourn’s comedy of the world of amateur dramatics, A Chorus Of Disapproval, albeit with the safety net of the play being built around a production of The Beggar's Opera.

Four years later, under the chairmanship of company stalwart Richard Bainbridge, YMTC mounted its second such play last week with plans to make a regular habit of integrating a straight play in a small-scale venue into each year's programme.

Save for company debutant Daniel Wilmot, who is an experienced hand from myriad plays in York, the cast was made up of actors schooled in musical theatre, and so Blue Remembered Hills served the dual purpose of diversifying YMTC's range of work and stretching the skills of Jennifer Page, Jo Poole, Malcolm Poole, Matthew Ainsworth, Larry Gibson and Robert Sager, alongside Wilmot.

Potter's play sets the bar high: the actors have to master a South Western accent – the setting is the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire – and they must play a group of seven-year-old children. What's more, they must play them without arch mimicry or a knowing nod to being adults portraying children. By doing so, Potter's dark, dark wartime drama, set on a sunny summer afternoon in 1943, emphasises how children can be just as cruel and calculating as adults.

Some of Bainbridge's company fared better than others, both with the accent and the stripping back of adulthood, but all were strong on the physicality of their roles and enjoyed the more intimate performance space than usual, performing on a set of hay bales and stepladders with a barn behind, bringing them up up close to an audience arranged around tables.