Penda's Fen (DVD)

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In the pastoral landscape of Three Choirs England, a clergyman's son, in his last days of school, has his idealistic value-system and the precious tokens of his self-image all broken away - his parentage, his nationality, his sexuality, his conventional patriotism and faith...

Penda's Fen" is the 16th episode of fourth season of the British BBC anthology TV series Play for Today. The episode was a television play that was originally broadcast on 21 March 1974. "Penda's Fen" was written by David Rudkin, directed by Alan Clarke, produced by David Rose, and starred Spencer Banks. [1] Plot [ edit ]The idea for Penda’s Fen came about after Rudkin’s wife described a diversion sign, that misspelt the name of the village. After some research, Rudkin discovered that the village had been spelt like that centuries ago. Not only was that spelling a mistake, but the one before that as well. This discovery was described by Rudkin as, ‘…the old, primeval ‘demon’ of the place opening half an eye…’ Stephen (Spencer Banks) sees the misspelling of the village Written by David Rudkin and directed by Alan Clarke, Penda's Fen was first broadcast in 1974 as part of the BBC's Play for Today series. It tells the story of seventeen year-old Stephen, a middle-class pastor's son who has a bizarre series of encounters with angels, the composer Edward Elgar, and King Penda, the mythical last pagan ruler of England. These encounters - whether real or imagined - force Stephen to question his religious beliefs, his politics and his sexuality. Another, more famous figure’s hidden historical reality is also unearthed in the film—Elgar. But it’s more than Elgar’s music that haunts Penda’s Fen: there’s something of his spirit, too… because the impulse of political institutions is always reductive: to limit us to identities that can be mechanically satisfied, thereby managed – i.e. controlled; to reduce us to identities that are predictable. I see it as our human identity to resist that reductive pressure; as our existential duty to subvert it at every turn.’ 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.

Bookended by news of an American President’s criminal scheming and looming impeachment, it may not have felt like the most imperative, urgent broadcast of the evening schedule, but this would be wrong. Sitting between reportage of Nixon’s folly was a complex, literary and intensely prescient story — its writer, David Rudkin, demonstrating that, like the personal, the parochial was political. It aired only once more on the BBC and, apart from a late-night broadcast on Channel 4 in the 1980s, Penda’s Fen seemed consigned to its status as an obscure footnote in television history. Due to the efforts of a handful of enthusiasts, critics, and now the BFI, however, it is now being recognised for what it is: a masterpiece. Moreover, in this fractious age of populism and identity politics, this erstwhile televisual oddity is only gaining traction in terms of its relevance. 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] Matthew Harle is Postdoctoral Research Fellow of the Barbican Centre and Guildhall School of Music and Drama.I also wanted wanted to show that as far as earthly life is concerned, death is an absolute parting and a farewell. The old Mr and Mrs Kings, living in their cottage and growing their neat vegetable garden also show the strength of those people who can accept this… 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? Robin Carmody. "Penda's Fen". Elidor.freeserve.co.uk. Archived from the original on 4 September 2012 . Retrieved 5 September 2012. In 1974, the BBC broadcast the film Penda’s Fen, leaving audiences mystified and spellbound. “Make no mistake. We had a major work of television last night,” The Times declared the next morning. Written by the playwright and classicist David Rudkin, the film follows Stephen, an 18-year-old boy, whose identity, sexuality, and suffocating nationalism unravel through a series of strange visions. After its original broadcast, Penda’s Fen vanished into mythic status, with only a single rebroadcast in 1990 sustaining its cult following. Penda’s Fen has now become totemic for those interested in Britain’s deep history, folklore, and landscape. The film’s screenwriter David Rudkin was both an insider and an outsider. He was of Northern Irish descent and his parents were evangelical Christians. He’d also studied at Cambridge, performed National Service in the Royal Corps of Signals, and taught classics at secondary school. This proximity to and muscle memory of the architectonics of Englishness is palpable in every scene of Penda’s Fen where he deconstructs most of its pillars. Stephen, a rather priggish adolescent, is defined by his education (a traditional grammar school), his religion (his father is a Rector), his home (a gorgeous stretch of the West Country whose green fields of forevermore his bedroom overlooks), and his politics (he believes in the sanctity of the nuclear family, and that the country is imperiled by left-wingers).

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. What makes Penda’s Fen particularly prescient is that it locates these hybrid transformations in the English countryside. The 1970s saw a number of artists offering new versions of pastoral – Philip Trevelyan’s The Moon and the Sledgehammer (1971) was a creepy documentary about a family living without electricity in a wood; Richard Mabey’s The Unofficial Countryside (1973) introduced readers to what would later be known as edgelands; Jeremy Sandford’s Tomorrow’s People (1974) portrayed the Dionysian longings of free-festival revellers. Rudkin shows rural England to be a place of struggles and heresies, of antagonisms and anguish. The film even turns to etymology, arguing that “pagan”, which originally meant “belonging to the village”, referred to the politics of local governance as much as it did to theological doctrine. 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). The institutions that Stephen is so keen to be a part of at the beginning of the film, are becoming less attractive. Arne touches upon this in the debate when he describes miners, factory workers and the villagers as unsuspecting fodder for something bigger than themselves. Stephen’s mother (Georgine Anderson) warns him about getting an education, as factory workers pour like ants out of a factory and surround them. She describes ambulances going to and from the factory, as the workers are forced into an early grave. This is still applicable today, with The World Health Organisation estimating that 700,000 people a year are dying from stroke and heart disease, because of long working hours. With the rise of globalisation, we are outsourcing our factory workers who are in low-income countries working in factories, with scant labour laws protecting them. 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.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. But I didn’t want to think merely of the past—I wanted to open a futuristic window on the landscape, too. So into the story is borne Arne, the embittered neighbour who offers Stephen a savage political outlook on tomorrow’s world…