Alan Clarke :: Penda’s Fen

Penda’s Fen begins with a young man who believes that the world can be kept in tune. Christianity, nation, family, masculinity: each has its proper register.

Across ninety minutes, Alan Clarke lets the Worcestershire landscape introduce other voices.

Stephen Franklin is seventeen, the son of an Anglican clergyman, an admirer of Edward Elgar and an earnest defender of an England whose institutions appear to him contiguous with its soil. He mistrusts socialism, reveres the military and speaks of marriage as though biology, morality and nation were different expressions of the same law. David Rudkin's script gives him enough intelligence to make these convictions troublesome. Stephen is not merely parroting adults. He has constructed a system.

Penda’s Fen, first broadcast as a BBC Play for Today on 21 March 1974, sets about loosening it. The wider television culture that allowed a ninety-minute drama this strange to occupy BBC1 sits behind The Country Between Programmes, Hwael's essay on Play for Today, regional production and the accidental archive left by the strand.

The remarkable thing is how little Alan Clarke alters the visible world while doing so. His Worcestershire remains made of ordinary roads, fields, parish rooms, school corridors, hedges and modest houses. Supernatural events arrive without the landscape first announcing itself as supernatural. An angel can occupy the same visual country as a bicycle ride.

Clarke gives the vision no separate visual grammar. There is no clear threshold at which ordinary reality has been suspended and something else has begun. The same camera that accepts a school corridor accepts an angel. This may be the film's deeper heresy: not simply that the supernatural exists, but that Stephen has no privileged way of deciding which parts of experience are entitled to count as reality.

Clarke was already developing the hard observational manner that would define much of his later work, and Penda’s Fenhas often been treated as an anomaly within his filmography. Even the BFI notes the apparent distance between Rudkin's theological visions and the social realism usually associated with Clarke. Yet the mismatch is productive. Another director might have made the countryside picturesque or sinister. Clarke keeps it stubbornly habitable.

The disturbances belong to Stephen before they belong to genre. His desire for one of his male schoolmates enters the film beside religious terror. An angel is followed by a demon. His father's Christianity proves considerably less orthodox than his own. He discovers that he is adopted. The composer whose music he has enlisted in his private idea of England appears before him and refuses the role Stephen has assigned him.

Elgar is crucial. Throughout the film, music from The Dream of Gerontius carries an immense emotional weight, but Rudkin uses the composer for something stranger than patriotic counterpoint. Stephen wants Elgar to guarantee a continuous England: landscape, faith and music joined in a single inheritance. The apparition instead speaks of uncertainty, composition and the unresolved enigma.

The lesson is musical before it becomes political.

Stephen listens for one governing line; Clarke and Rudkin keep introducing counterpoint.

Christian and pagan, male and female, sacred and erotic, English and foreign, obedience and dissent cease to behave like choices in which one term must abolish the other. They begin to coexist uneasily within the same person. Hadrien Fontanaud has persuasively described this as the film's rejection of purity in favour of hybridity. The instability reaches the form itself, which moves through coming-of-age drama, political argument, visionary television and horror without settling comfortably inside any of them.

Clarke keeps returning all of this to physical places. The church proves no better at containing Christianity than the family does at containing inheritance. The school's authority looks increasingly provisional. Even the countryside, which Stephen has treated almost as evidence, refuses to testify on his behalf. It remains recognisable, ordinary and stubbornly incapable of proving the England he has imagined.

Even names begin to move. Pinvin acquires the older form Pendefen, “Penda's Fen”, linking Stephen's apparently settled Worcestershire to the Mercian king Penda and to a political geography older than England itself. The historical relationship between modern place-name and king should be handled cautiously, but within Rudkin's drama the mutation is decisive: an insignificant-looking name can hold incompatible periods at once. Tom White has described such place-names in relation to the film as carriers of discontinuous historical inheritance rather than inert linguistic fossils.

This helps explain why Penda’s Fen has aged better than much television concerned explicitly with national identity. It does not uncover a more authentic England underneath the modern one. There is no pristine pagan country waiting for Christianity to be scraped away. Penda does not correct the map; he makes it less certain.

Stephen begins by imagining Englishness as something received intact. By the end, inheritance has become an accumulation of incompatible materials: Mercian, Christian, Celtic, European, familial, adopted, sexual, musical. The country has not been exposed as false. It can simply no longer be reduced to a single pedigree.

The dream imagery remains disturbing for the same reason. Clarke rarely converts vision into explanatory symbolism. Burnt flesh, severed hands, figures of authority, angels and demons retain some resistant matter after their thematic function has been recognised. They have the unfinished quality of dreams that continue to trouble us because interpretation has failed to exhaust them.

Spencer Banks is essential to this. He allows Stephen's certainty to become embarrassing without making him contemptible. His transformation does not proceed smoothly towards enlightenment. Conviction breaks in pieces. Shame, exhilaration, fear and intellectual discovery remain mixed together.

When Penda finally appears, the encounter has none of the satisfaction of finding the original owner of the land. The king is another voice.

By then Stephen's harder transformation has already taken place. His ecstatic declaration that he is composed of mixed race, mixed sex, darkness and light is often treated as the destination of the film, and understandably so. Yet something quieter has happened before it. Stephen has learned that contradiction need not be solved.

The Worcestershire around him looks almost unchanged. That may be Clarke's most radical decision. The hedges have not opened to reveal an older England. The fields have not become sacred ground. The road signs remain where they were. History, desire and religious doubt have entered the ordinary landscape without displacing it.

At the beginning, Stephen wanted the country around him to confirm what he already believed. By the end it has given him no such confirmation. It has only become more crowded: with older histories, competing faiths, desire, music, memory and doubt.

Penda’s Fen leaves Stephen inside a country that no longer agrees with itself. For the first time, he can hear it.