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 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.

That restraint matters. Clarke was already developing the hard observational manner that would define much of his later work, and Penda’s Fen has 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 therefore 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 here.

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 is political.

Stephen listens melodically. He wants one governing line.

Clarke and Rudkin give him 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 movement as the film's rejection of purity in favour of hybridity; the instability extends to the work's form, which passes through coming-of-age drama, political argument, visionary television and horror without settling comfortably inside any of them.

But Clarke keeps returning that argument to physical places.

The church cannot secure Christianity. The school cannot secure authority. The family cannot secure biological inheritance. The countryside cannot secure the pastoral idea of England.

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 becomes capable of holding 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 is one reason 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 the map less certain.

The film's politics operate through that loss of certainty. 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 has become impossible to reduce to a single pedigree.

This is also why the dream imagery remains disturbing. 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 precisely 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 has undergone the more difficult conversion: from purity to plurality. 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 the quieter transformation has happened earlier. He 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.

Penda’s Fen leaves Stephen inside a country that no longer agrees with itself.

For the first time, he can hear it.