Penda’s Fen
(1974)
(SPOILERS) Confession time: I wasn’t even aware Penda’s Fen existed before reading a
recent Fortean Times piece on haunted
childhoods of the ‘70s, curious in itself as Play for Today wasn’t exactly teatime, Basil Brush and Doctor Who,
viewing (I guess they’re taking in inquisitive teenagers). But it’s very easy
to see why the piece, directed by Alan Clarke from a teleplay by David Rudkin,
had an impact on impressionable young minds. It’s just the sort of fare, with
its open countryside and occult undertones, that proves indelible, in the
manner of Children of the Stones or The Owl Service (or Alan Garner
generally). That, and simply the way that movies and TV were made then; the
texture of film, the lingering of edits and weight of imagery and unnaturalistic
dialogue.
That said, I’m not sure the more fantasy-tinged end of the
spectrum was really Clarke’s forte (he also gave us the less than venerated Billy the Kid and the Green Baize Vampire).
Whether it’s his reading of the script or just his eye, there’s a literalness
to his depiction of young protagonist Stephen Franklin’s imaginings that’s
rather less evocative than Mr Arne’s impassioned, paranoid rants at the local
village meeting. Apparently, Dudkin requested Clarke for the gig, and the
director admitted to never fully understanding the material. Dudkin commented
of Clarke “He distrusted intellectual
drama, and was wary of the story’s frames of scholarly reference: theology,
Latin and Greek, classical harmony… I said he was to let all that aspect look
after itself, and concentrate on the emotions”.
Stephen (Spencer Banks, also of Timeslip) nurses the readily recognisable (stereotypical?) symptoms
of repressed sexuality, adopting a staunchly conservative (its difficult not to
see a whiff of Michael J Fox’s character in Family
Ties, only less humorously, in his morally severe attitude to the world and
those around him). Living in the Malvern Hills, the son of a pastor (John
Atkinson), Stephen juggles a confused passion for the milkman (Ron Smerczak)
with his public-school affiliation to the combined cadet force and an obsession
with Elgar, and more especially The Dream
of Gerontius. He’s almost a parody of the prig in his behaviour towards
others; his teachers and even his mother find his dogma tiresome, but the film
takes him on an increasingly sympathetic journey of sexual, socio-political and
spiritual awakening, one fuelled by the landscape around him, its myths and
archetypes, in which visions form, guiding him to a place of new awareness.
As his father tells him, dreams are true: “The truth you need to know about yourself for
your wellbeing”. And Penda’s Fen
is accordingly about stripping away the outer paraphernalia to reach core truth.
Stephen’s major influences, the father he has assumed is a traditionalist and
the lefty writer (a positively youthful Ian Hogg’s Arne) towards whom he is
initially antagonistic, lead him to reject those more formal props of
appropriate behaviour, of schooling and the military, and of respect by his peer
group (Honeybone, about whom Stephen has erotic dreams, like most of those
around Stephen, recognises he is “different” and leads the rugby squad in a
ritual humiliation).
So Stephen starts off complaining of the “modern wilderness of amorality” and
(suggestive that any such restrictive viewpoint is indicative of repression on
the part of the proponent) gets all Mary Whitehouse about Arne’s work (there’s
“always someone unnatural in his TV plays”).
But because he translates “Know thyself”
as “Discover thyself”, he takes the
rejection by the presiding authority figures in his stride; he leaves the CCF,
whereupon he is accused of being a non-cooperative (or unmutual: Number Six
would be proud), accompanied by the inevitable impugning of his masculinity
(the Major wonders if he wants to be a man at all). Stephen also reacts
indifferently to being told he can’t be recommended for the sixth form club (“If that’s how you feel, sir”). It’s a
necessary path; after all, it’s his inability to express himself that causes
destruction (the death of a bird beneath the milk float while he is paralysed
by Joel’s presence: Joel, who appears on his bed as a demon, and is forceful
when he realises Stephen’s intentions – “That’s
all”).
The pulse running through Penda’s Fen relates to a philosophical musing over Manichean
forces, as proposed by Arne and debated between Stephen and his father, fuelled
by Stephen’s visions of angels and demons and his obsession with The Dream of Gerontius (“What is to happen to my soul?” we hear Stephen
ask at the opening; the Dream relates
the musician’s experience after death as he comes before the throne of God (or
Penda), encounters angels and demons, and hears “the dissonance that is the piercing gaze of God”). Arne speaks of
the Manichean challenge, speculating that a church acts as an aerial for such
forces, while the pastor admits “I am not
sure which side the church has always been on”, taking a moderate view towards
their “heresy” (to the Manicheans,
Jesus was one of many sons of light in the “unending
battle to save man’s spark of light”).
And there are nominal oppositions throughout. Arne considers
himself subversive, albeit of his plays he admits “I make ‘em tamer now”. Stephen is subtly aware that the political
troublemaker is less insightful than his father, so impassioned is Arne by his
position (“Oh I don’t know” Stephen
replies, when Arne suggests the pastor would be horrified by his tirades,
because Stephen has already heard his father’s heresy: “You believe in God” he earlier asks in confirmation. “I believe in truth” his father replies, having
also spoken of the “troubling historical
and spiritual reality of God himself”. He is only conservative in terms of a
reserved disposition, not of an exercised mind.
And symbolically, the final scene, as Stephen rejects the
fake parents of his vision – “There you
have seen the true dark enemies of England. Sick father and mother, who would
have us children forever” – informs Penda’s
Fen, tying in with Arne’s obsession with vile technocracy and Stephen’s
vision of willing sacrifice of hands to the state (sacrificing their freedom,
remaining children forever). So Stephen is able to marry and satisfying the
twin opposing forces: “I am nothing pure.
Nothing pure. My race is mixed. My sex is mixed. I am woman and man, light and
darkness. I am mud and flame”.
Penda’s Fen has shares
a romanticism towards the old religion with the likes of John Masefield’s Box of Delights. Something even the pastor
recognises. Stephen lives in Pinvin – Penda’s Fen, the name though to reference
the last pagan king of Mercia – and there are discussions tying paganism to the
correct social grouping, the positive one, and so kicking against the urban
(and implicitly Christian) one. Pagan means “belonging to the village” we are told, and it seems to me that a scathing
review of the play on Amazon, that refers to it as having a “globalist” agenda
(based mainly on the idea that Stephen’s final speech symbolises a unified world)
is rather missing the point, that the Pastor explicitly puts the microcosm
first when he sings the benefits of the centred village over the sprawl of the
city, the community of the countryside. That, and Arne’s railing against the
machine.
Brott: The British working man will never let a
dictatorship happen. He’s too bloody-minded.
Arne explicitly rejects the metropolis for The Good Life, and I have to admit I
found his conspiratorial tirades about the “strategically
expendable populace” in response to emotive language being used to condemn strikes
holding the country to ransom (very much flavour of the month at the time) the
most engaging aspects of the play. Arne all but whispers illuminati agendas
when he speculates “What is it, hidden
beneath this shell of lovely earth? Some hideous angel of
technocratic death? Some alternative city for government from beneath? Motorways
there, offices, control suites. Silent there, empty, waiting for the day”,
as there are numerous such theories and postulations regarding such vast
underground complexes. Further, he digs into the occult obsessions of the elite
when he notes “Those lonely places our
technocrats chose for their extreme experiments” (Los Alamos for instance)
and “Sick laboratories built on or
beneath these haunted sites” even if he responds “Not in the least” when asked by the pastor if the is interested in
the occult.
For Arne, the dystopia is inevitable – the forces will only
rise – and the one hope for man is that the great concrete megacity inspires
the seeds of “Disobedience. Chaos. Out of
those alone can some new experiment in human living be born”. Accompanying
Arne’s speculations is a confirmatory side plot, in which a burnt man is
discovered in the countryside, an aspect that not only projects a similarly
eerie apocalyptic feeling to Edge of
Darkness but also expressly conjures the spectre of upper tier machinations
when the very Roswell cover story “man
injured by weather balloon” is released (yet the measure of the play is
such that it would less lend itself to an “out there” hypothesis as an “in here”).
If I wanted to go further along this line, I might suggest
the PINVIN changed to PINFIN in Stephen’s mind on signs is a representation of
the Mandela Effect 40 years early. I have to admit, however, that the visionary
aspect of Penda’s Fen is the least
resonant aspect, because, as I’ve suggested, it’s so very literal. You could
see Nicolas Roeg coalescing such material far more seamlessly, whereas Clarke
gives us King Penda sitting atop a hill like he’s waiting around for a Depeche
Mode video, a great crack appearing down the aisle of a church, and a really
rather rote conversation between Stephen and Elgar (who resembles one of the
hosts of History Today).
Penda’s Fen
doesn’t offer much in the way of humour, about the closest it skirts is Stephen
being told by his parents of his adoption, and that “Like the English language, Stephen, you have foreign parents too”
(Britishness is itself just a mask, an illusion). The pastor then follows this
up with the reassuring “Even Elgar has
some Welsh blood”.
I’m not sure Penda’s
Fen is quite the masterpiece its rediscovery makes out, but it’s a
fascinating piece of work, the likes of which simply could not be imagined now,
either in terms of writing or delivery. If it’s rather didactic at points with
regard to the latter, the conversations are engrossingly literary. It scarcely
matters if anyone talks like this outside of the realm of academia: they’re interesting. Rudkin and Clarke have
created a textured, layered examination of identity, and the “identity” of
Englishness.
Agree? Disagree? Mildly or vehemently? Let me know in the comments below.
Comments
Post a comment