Penda's Fen (DVD)

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Penda’s Fen was a TV play first screened in March 1974 in the BBC’s Play For Today strand. It was shot entirely on film (many dramas in the 1970s recorded their interiors on video) and runs for about 90 minutes. The writer was David Rudkin and it was directed by Alan Clarke, a director regarded by many (myself included) as one of the great talents to emerge from British television during the 1960s and 70s. The film was commissioned by David Rose, a producer at the BBC’s Pebble Mill studios in Birmingham, as one of a number of regional dramas. Rudkin was, and still is, an acclaimed playwright and screenwriter whose work is marked by recurrent themes which would include the tensions between pagan spirituality and organized religion, and the emergence of unorthodox sexuality. Both these themes are present in Penda’s Fen, and although the sexuality aspect of his work is important—pioneering, even—he’s far from being a one-note proselytiser. Alan Clarke is renowned today for his later television work which included filmed plays such as Scum (banned by the BBC and re-filmed as a feature), Made in Britain (Tim Roth’s debut piece), The Firm (with Gary Oldman), and Elephant whose title and Steadicam technique were swiped by Gus Van Sant. Penda’s Fen was an early piece for Clarke after which his work became (in Rudkin’s words) “fierce and stark”.

But: how might it play with the ladies, I wonder? Apart from Annabel above the interest in this wonderful film – on this blog anyway – seems to be almost entirely a male one. (I’m assuming that Flying Stag is probably a male..?) There is so much to love and admire in this film that I feel a reluctance to say this but: the women xters in the film are surely stereotypical/marginal? I say that & then of course reflect that the mutilation of women by men is one of the most powerful sequences in the film. In film, dare I say?There has to be an Alan Clarke film in this season. Although it’s a real outlier in terms of his body of work, this was a touchstone when I was developing Enys Men. I’d be lying if I said I fully knew what the film means. As with Robert Bresson’s work, I prioritise feeling over understanding. Besides, even Clarke claimed to not really know what it was about. The story is helped along with phantasmagorical imagery, both dark and light, by way of the young man's dreams and imagination. But ultimately these become set pieces in the greater story and its resolution. Pretty bold fare, I would think, for what was then a 1974 TV movie originally airing on British television. Stephen begins with certainty over who he is and where he comes from, ‘Oh my country. I say over and over: I am one of your sons, it is true, I am, I am. Yet how shall I show my love?’ He wants to be a part of the institutions of not only England but masculinity, but layer by layer his surety is peeled away. He comes to the realisation that there is no such thing as ‘purity’ or pure Englishness or masculinity, he is man and woman. Through a series of encounters, Stephen learns that his sense of ‘purity’ was naïve. Penda (Geoffrey Staines) anoints Stephen No account of the film’s making would be complete without mention of its commissioning editor, David Rose. Tasked in 1971 by David Attenborough to head a new regional television drama department at Pebble Mill Studios in Birmingham, he immediately set about developing adventurous projects – by writers such as Alan Bleasdale, Alan Plater, Michael Abbensetts and Willy Russell – that were steeped in the lore and soundworlds of non-metropolitan Britain. He has described Penda’s Fen as ‘a milestone, if not the milestone, of my career’, though, 40 years after it was first broadcast, he also admitted, ‘I didn’t understand it at all, but that’s as it should be.’

Raby, David (1998). David Rudkin: Sacred Disobedience: an expository study of his drama 1959-96. Oxford, Routledge. ISBN 90-5702-126-9. Penda’s Fen is a very simple story; it tells of a boy, Stephen, who in the last summer of his boyhood has a series of encounters in the landscape near his home which alter his view of the world… Penda’s Fen was produced by David Rose who was head of English Regional Drama at the time and responsible for nurturing some incredible British writers and directors such as Alan Bleasdale, David Hare and Mike Leigh. It was Rose’s idea to bring David Rudkin and Alan Clarke together for Penda’s Fen. In his notes to the screenplay Rudkin wrote: Strikingly, it is even more than this. Penda's Fen presciently maps onto the current moment, countering nationalism, the conservatism of the provinces, war-mongering and the suppression of an emerging identity politics. Rudkin’s film was broadcast months before the impeachment of a corrupt, duplicitous President in a world threatened by thermonuclear destruction. In the year that Moonlight triumphed under the presidency of Donald Trump, it is important we remember its archival forebears, as Penda also contributes to the same radical filmic tradition — a pregnant counter-cinema — where the everyday becomes newly estranged, old certainties are sloughed off, and entrenched shibboleths don’t bear scrutiny.Spencer Banks is the principal actor in Penda’s Fen, playing Stephen Franklin, an 18-year-old in his final days at school. The BBC’s Radio Times magazine described the film briefly: Originally produced and broadcast as an episode of Play For Today, Penda’s Fen was written by David Rudkin and directed by Alan Clarke (who later admitted that he didn’t fully understand the script). Odd how, like me, a lot of men seem to have seen the play in their teens and been unaccountably but deeply moved by it. It’s a kind of English Death of Salesman maybe, in that it cuts down beneath the defences and is saturated in the dilemmas and historical legacies & dilemmas of one particular culture. A middle class pastor's son has dreams of angels and the pagan King Penda that force him to question many of his beliefs and opinions. Show full synopsis

The earth beneath your feet feels solid there. It is not. Somewhere there the land is hollow. Somewhere beneath, is being constructed, something. We’re not supposed to know.” It is through the benign paternal influence of Reverend Franklin, as well as the more strident one of Arne, that Stephen’s Blakean visions work against his previously held convictions — by the end of the film, he is no longer in danger of growing up into Nigel Farage. Before he is redeemed by the “true” Jesus and the pagan King Penda, he must escape the attentions of the “Mother and Father of England”, the embodiment of the censorious establishment reaction to the social revolution of the 1960s. I began to think of ‘burials’—like the legend of King Arthur, not dead but merely sleeping underground to wake again on a trumpet blast in England’s hour of peril. But I was becoming interested in another king—only a century after Arthur. And, if this king’s name is not exactly a household word, that’s because he was on the losing side. But he is a historical reality—we have the dates of his reign, the battles he fought. He was the last pagan king in England; I was thinking of Penda of Mercia… The wars that Penda waged against his Christianised neighbours were not religious wars—in fact, Penda himself did not try to prevent his son and daughter from becoming Christians as part of the dynastic marriage pacts they made—he was fighting for the political survival of Mercia. Not many years after the battle in which he died, England was Christianised—yet the old, dark ‘demon’ of Penda’s England refuses to lie down…

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Join the BFI mailing list for regular programme updates. Not yet registered? Create a new account at www.bfi.org.uk/signup Penda’s Fen is perhaps the most significant film to be made during the rural turn that, as William Fowler has noted, British cinema took in the early 1970s. A decline in manufacturing had led to the shrinkage of many urban centres, and that, combined with a post-sixties vogue for communes, free festivals and pre-industrial ways of being, inspired artists such as Derek Jarman ( Journey to Avebury, 1971), William Raban ( Colours of This Time, 1972), and Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo ( Winstanley, 1975) to explore the submerged histories, altered states and radical possibilities of the British landscape. There’s scarcely a speech like it in British cinema: ‘No, no! I am nothing pure! My race is mixed! My sex is mixed! I am woman and man, light with darkness, nothing pure! I am mud and flame!’ So cries Stephen, the teenager whose transformation from sanctimonious parroter of establishment values to apostle of cultural alterity, is chronicled in Penda’s Fen. It’s a moment of awakening and of revelation, a jailbreak holler, a vision of a new kind of nationhood that anticipates by decades the work of historiographers and academic theorists who would later speak of the inseparability of ‘nation and narration’, of ‘the invention of tradition’, of ‘imagined communities’. I think of Penda’s Fen as more a film for television than a TV play—not just because it was shot in real buildings on actual film but because of its visual force… Rural Worcestershire. 17-year-old pastor's son Stephen Franklin sits in his room writing about Elgar's 'The Dream of Gerontius' in an exercise book. The following morning, Stephen plays the organ at his school assembly and takes part in a debate in which he condemns a TV program that questioned the gospels' account of Jesus' life. He goes on to champion the role of family in Christian England.

When I think of The Ghost Stories for Christmas series, I think of Lawrence Gordon Clark more than MR James. But of all the James adaptations, this is my favourite – a highly atmospheric piece of visual storytelling with a chilling climax. I find the simplicity of the filmmaking invigorating. No doubt born of limitation, this is cinema by way of TV. The most ambitious of Alan Clarke’s early projects, Penda’s Fen at first seems a strange choice for him. Most scripts that attracted Clarke, no matter how non-naturalistic, had a gritty, urban feel with springy vernacular dialogue (and sometimes almost no dialogue). David Rudkin’s screenplay is different: rooted in a mystical rural English landscape, it is studded with long, self-consciously poetic speeches and dense with sexual/mythical visions and dreams, theological debate and radical polemic—as well as an analysis of Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius. But though Penda’s Fen is stylistically the odd film out in Clarke’s work, it trumpets many of his favourite themes, in particular what it means to be English in the last quarter of the twentieth century. In 2011, "Penda's Fen" was chosen by Time Out London magazine as one of the 100 best British films. It described the play as a "multi-layered reading of contemporary society and its personal, social, sexual, psychic and metaphysical fault lines. Fusing Elgar's ‘Dream of Gerontius’ with a heightened socialism of vibrantly localist empathy, and pagan belief systems with pre-Norman histories and a seriously committed – and prescient – ecological awareness, ‘Penda's Fen’ is a unique and important statement." [7]Rudkin’s play wasn’t a one-off, his other work is equally powerful, engaging and fascinating. A later film for the BBC, the wildly ambitious Artemis 81, is three hours in length (!) and explores similar themes, albeit in a less coherent fashion. It also includes Daniel Day-Lewis’s first screen appearance and has Sting playing Hywel Bennett’s angelic object of homoerotic desire. Rudkin’s stage work is fiercely imaginative, using Joycean dialogue to striking effect, and I’m continually surprised that no one seems interested in re-staging remarkable plays such as The Sons of Light. As for Penda’s Fen, whenever a TV executive tries to argue that television hasn’t dumbed down I’d offer this work as Exhibit A for the prosecution. Rudkin and Clarke’s film was screened at 9.35 in the evening on the nation’s main TV channel, BBC 1, at a time when there were only three channels to choose from. A primetime audience of many millions watched this visceral and unapologetically intelligent drama; show me where this happens today. Rudkin shows the English countryside as a place, not of becalmed continuity and ‘old maids bicycling to holy communion through the morning mist’, but as a historical battleground and in constant turmoil. It offers wormholes and geysers, faultlines that fertilise, ruptures that release energy. It’s a philosophy of pastoral – and of what makes a nation – that sloughs off Little Englandism and Middle Earthism in favour of something less self-satisfied and more attuned to its lurking darknesses.