Theme Of Let's Run For It

In scenes 20-23, the children are at their “Peak desperation”, and their most emotionally vulnerable. The escaped prisoner of war or “Itie” has caused this, from whom the children are hiding. When “The six run in a ragged formation”, away from the “Itie”, fear is preventing the children from being able to express their concerns. Instead of discussing what would be the best thing to do, Peter suggests, “Let’s run for it!” To show the fear of the children, Potter uses adults to play the roles of children; to the audience this amplifies the suffering of the children. The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw stated, “Seeing an adult cry like a child is shocking, and adult actors can make children's pain brutally and tactlessly real to an audience which wants to forget what being a child was actually like”. This connotes that both in the play and in real life; children struggle to express their frustrations or concerns.

In scene 20, Willie, who I think is the most intelligent of the characters, expresses his apprehensions by voicing them. However, in response to the same fear “Raymond has his hands to his ears, eyes
Donald burning himself on a match is similar to the burning of witches to help them achieve purity. Even if all the evidence someone on trial for witchcraft presented were true, she would be burn at stake in spite of this. This relates to Donald’s inability to speak his mind as if he told his mother his concerns she would “Hit him with a poker,” which proves Donald is unable to raise his concerns. Additionally Donald tries to emulate fate and judges the ability of the straw to light as symbolic to his father’s fate claiming, “If it doesn’t light this time the Japs have won.” The fate of his father is a pressing concern for Donald, who begs, “Come- back – Dad - Come- back - Dad”, but he feels he is unable to discuss it relying on fate as opposed to verbalising his concern to lessen