Simmonds, Paul. "100 best British films: The list - Time Out London". Timeout.com . Retrieved 5 September 2012. The Dream of Gerontinus is about a journey through purgatory; a man searching for a place for his soul. Stephen is on a similar quest and has all his preconceptions shattered by finding out he’s not English, he’s not ‘pure’. At the end, the Father and Mother of England come to claim him as their own, but Stephen has irrevocably changed, not only by the information he has found out about himself but by the information he has discovered about the land. 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] The first idea for the film came to me from something that happened a couple of years ago. It almost grew out of a village or, rather, its name (I won’t say what the name was because I use it for a special reason in the film). My wife was coming home one day when she found the road to the village closed. There was a diversion sign—and the name of the village had been misspelt by one letter. But it didn’t look like a mistake, more as if the painter had a different pronunciation. I found that the name had been spelt and pronounced this way—but centuries ago. And this was a corruption of an older, 12th-century version, itself a corruption of the oldest name of all, dating from pre-Christian times. You could, if you like, be fanciful and say that the misspelling was the old, primeval ‘demon’ of the place opening half an eye…

Penda’s Fen is visually striking and director Alan Clarke, later admitted that he didn’t really understand it. During an interview about his work, Rudkin said, ‘I am afflicted by images, by things that are seen, pictures of things, they are extraordinary, momentary, but they stay with me.’ He was talking about his play Afore Night Come, but could easily be talking about Penda’s Fen which features, angels, demons and other striking scenes. Child be Strange, A Symposium on Penda’s Fen is at BFI Southbank on Saturday June 10th Information here

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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.” 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.

Music from Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius features throughout the play. The 1971 Decca recording by Benjamin Britten with Yvonne Minton as the Angel is used, and the album itself features as a prop. Extracts from Elgar's Introduction and Allegro are also heard. 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… P enda’s Fen was first broadcast on Thursday 21st of March for the BBC1 strand Play for Today. It was written by David Rudkin (1936-) who rose to prominence in the ’60s with his play, Afore Night Come (1962). Rudkin was inspired by the playwright Harold Pinter, Forthcoming from Strange Attractor Books, the critical anthology Child be Strange will not only include new scholarship ensuing from the conference — written by the participating academics, critics, and medievalists — but a wealth of other material. Child be Strange will be a sourcebook for Penda’s Fen, and collect original archival texts and images, creative responses, walking guides, chronologies, glossaries relating to the myths and landscapes of Penda’s Fen, recommended reading, watching, and summaries of peripheral works. There were many socio-political changes in the 70s, including a clash between liberals and conservatives as censorship legislation was loosened. TV, film and books were changing what was considered acceptable viewing. Many people weren’t happy with the changes and took it upon themselves to monitor the ‘arts’. Mary Whitehouse was campaigning against the permissiveness of society and founded a group called the Clean up TV Campaign in 1964, and their first meeting was in Birmingham’s Town Hall.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… 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. In one young man’s search for his sense of self, writer David Rudkin takes us on a magnificently ambiguous metaphysical journey quite unlike any other TV play. The cult status of Penda’s Fen is no doubt due to its potent mix of mysticism, music and landscape which taps into an elemental truth about who we are and our pagan past. 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. Penda's Fen, with its discussions of Manichean philosophy, dream sequences and the appearance of mythical creatures, seems somehow out of place in Alan Clarke's output. Indeed Clarke himself, who was recruited to direct the play at the behest of Rudkin who saw him as one of the best TV directors in Britain at the time, claimed he never fully understand what the play was about. Nevertheless, the exploration of white English masculinity is a theme common to many of Clarke's dramas. While Stephen is far removed from the aggressive, urban and often working-class (anti) heroes typical of Alan Clarke dramas, he shares their disenfranchisement and their desire to rebel against his surroundings.

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… Robin Carmody. "Penda's Fen". Elidor.freeserve.co.uk. Archived from the original on 4 September 2012 . Retrieved 5 September 2012. 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’.Young Stephen, in the last summer of his boyhood, has somehow awakened a buried force in the landscape around him. It is trying to communicate some warning, a peril he is in; some secret knowledge; some choice he must make, some mission for which he is marked down. Yes, Rudkin is naturally going to be identified with Arne but that doesn’t necessarily prevent him from using his own interests or experience for one or more characters in the same piece. Many authors will tell you that there’s a piece of themselves in all their characters, good or bad. One place to look for further information might by an academic study by David Ian Rabey, David Rudkin: Sacred Disobedience: an expository study of his drama 1959–96. Another book I don’t own… Critics have noted that the play stands apart from Clarke's other, more realist output. Clarke himself admitted that he did not fully understand what the story was about. [4] Nonetheless it has gone on to acquire the status of minor classic, to win awards and to be rebroadcast several times by the BBC. [ citation needed] This revelation from Stephen crowns Penda’s Fen. It is a final and utter rejection of a cloistered purview and likely an entirely accurate reflection of the typical social ambit of a vicar's son growing up in the Midlands countryside: his world is limited to solitary meditation in his bedroom, the stifling male environment of his school, and lonely bicycle rides in the lonely expanses of the surrounding hills. Moreover, it is an acceptance of Stephen’s emergent homosexuality, that we see glimpses of in his teenage infatuation with his milkman. The more typical adolescent world of drinking and carousing is seen only briefly early in the film—a car full of young revellers pulling over so someone can get out and have a pee—a snapshot of normality that is brutally cut short. However, we never see any of these manifold threads truly tie up. Penda is a film full of interruptions, distractions and incompletions; it demands multiple viewings, as it wanders like the itinerant gaze of Alan Clarke’s camera over the Worcester landscape. It deserves interrogation: Penda is myth, music, ecocriticism, gender and folklore, buried in celluloid. Even though the Midlands was a cornerstone of the industrial revolution, because of its natural resources, it also produced plenty of dissenters and radicals, most prominently in the Lunar Society and Victorians such as Darwin. Penda’s Fen features the hymn Jerusalem, said by many to be England’s unofficial anthem. The words were by William Blake who was staunch anti industrialist. Blake makes reference to ‘dark Satanic Mills’ which has been interpreted as factory workers who were working under the yolk of the rich, including the monarchy. Blake believed that industrialisation mechanised the lives of people and saw it as an evil. As Stephen’s mum tells him, ‘A man cannot leave the belt for one moment, without calling a stand-in to take his place. The belt moves on regardless of the needs of men…It gets at his heart, his life’s whole rhythm gets chained to the machine.’