To say that
Penda's Fen is overrated would be a criminal understatement. Just google it and you'll get a taster of the extruded verbiage. (BFI's
take on the play actually comes up before Wikipedia's.) On the other hand, David Rudkin's 1974 television play
is certainly worth watching. It's also worth thinking about and (witness one's own effort!) worth writing about.
Dramatically and thematically it is a failure. But it is a heroic, indeed romantic failure. It titillates aesthetically, intellectually, theologically, poetically, musically (almost to excess), politically, historically, romantically and (of course!) sexually. It manages to maintain a consistent tone throughout, and yet it skips, nay gambols quite happily from one television genre to another - one moment a gay coming-of-age drama, one moment a neo-socialist social realist critique of modern living, one moment a whimsical paean to old England... and at other times fairly blundering into symbolism, magical realism, surrealism, allegorical fantasy and "folk horror" (albeit to a much more limited extent than some of its fans would have you think when they compare it to
The Wicker Man and/or
Children of the Stones - because actually it's not very much like them at all).
Its dramatic failure is arguably more forgivable than its thematic one.* Cardboard characters and a lack of any real plot have always been seen as acceptable in a play about "ideas". But
Penda's Fen rather pushes that envelope. For example we never find out
why Stephen is unpopular at school, with his teachers or his peers - beyond some vague stereotypical hooey (which by 1973 was already ten years out of date) about the school being a rugby and CCF-type establishment (albeit one with ancient Greek slogans in the gym) whereas Stephen likes romantic music and theology. Later on we have a brief late night
Doctor Who-style close encounter down in the eponymous fen between a group of unfortunate teenagers and some sort of fucked-up military experiment involving radiation. But then the incident is never mentioned again. Stephen himself has visions, but it's beyond the wit of the writer to let us know why. Are they genuinely supernatural, or the product of the character's own mental disturbance, or just expressions of his own imagination? (It's a comparatively minor quibble, but still one that leaves a sense of the story's being clever but somewhat underwritten.†) Worse still, it would be a perfectly satisfying moral for the story to have that a young man's intellectual quest for authenticity should ultimately be less important to him than (a) self-discovery and (b) loyalty to his loved ones (i.e. to his adopted parents and to the country he has learned to call home). But
Penda's Fen's young man flunks self-discovery and then also flunks coming to terms with his new moral environment. He finds out that he's adopted not through his own efforts but because his adopted parents tell him he is on his eighteenth birthday, and then he shows no interest in who his real parents were. And having failed in his personal quest for racial and moral purity, he implicitly embraces impurity ('be secret, child, be strange – dark, true, impure, dissonant'††), and we end with a slightly ambiguous final shot of the boy returning to his adopted home and (presumably) the love of his adopted parents - but at the end of a dramatic work whose tone is nowhere near sufficiently subtle to make us feel that such ambiguity is either appropriate or satisfying.
All of which, of course, makes even less sense on a thematic or symbolic level! At the beginning of the play Stephen is listening to
The Dream of Gerontius. We hear that the music was by "devout Catholic" Sir Edward Elgar, but not that Elgar ended up going from being a "devout" Catholic to being a "lapsed" Catholic, or indeed that the libretto for
Dream was by infamous
gay Catholic convert Cardinal Newman.††† And then we hear nothing of Catholicism again. Meanwhile, Stephen also knows that Manichaeism is a heresy, and then under the guidance of his vicar father learns to reject its "light and darkness" view of the world in favour of a less "pure", or perhaps just less puritanical, more down-to-earth and even "pagan" version of Christianity - perhaps even the patriotic peasant piety of St Joan of Arc (who was canonised by the Catholic Church in 1920). But how exactly is any of this "subversive", either by modern standards or indeed those of 1974?†††† And did socialists digging in vegetable gardens seem radical (except in
a literal sense) in the early '70s? Jeremy Corbyn probably thinks
his allotment is radical even nowadays, but by the late '70s such things were the preserve of
Tom and Barbara Good and one's own semi-suburban Tory-voting grandparents. Worst of all is poor Penda himself, appearing at the end like a pantomime king (and looking like one too - another dramatic screw-up!). Rudkin could have played an interesting thematic game pitting modern day political militarism (and xenophobia - because why not?) against a deep patriotism of a pre-Conquest old England. Such a perfectly respectable left-wing
Penda's Fen fan as Michael Wood would have been quite comfortable with that sort of take. But Rudkin bottles it (and one wonders why) and just leaves off with a vague notion that a pagan king can in some improbable way represent the ordinary common man versus the nasty post-imperialist British Establishment. (On a meta level of course it's no more improbable than a classically educated BBC playwright imagining that he's taking the side of the common man against nasty establishment types like, er, Mary Whitehouse.
Γνώθι σεαυτόν indeed!)
One would of course like to concede that that's the whole point. Surely romanticism isn't really supposed to "make sense" in a rational way? Dreams are weird. That's why we like them. Arguably that's why we have them.
Penda's Fen is about a young man who has dreams, and it is itself dream-like. So what for example
is the symbolic significance of a waking nightmare horror sequence where Stephen sees little kiddies getting their hands chopped off? Does this express some latent
fear of paganism? After all, with the exception of a brief
Fuseli-type nightmare sequence it is indeed the only scene that comes anywhere near to genuine horror. Or is it supposed to symbolize the brutally debilitating nature of British education - because children have to be spiritually mutilated to make them "fit in"? Or is it both? The meaning is not made clear. But the point perhaps is that
Penda's Fen is a post-modern and impressionistic work - and "pagan" also in the sense of being non-didactic. As with other cult shows of the late '60s and early '70s (because
The Prisoner springs to mind) the viewer is
expected to make of it what he will.
And that of course makes me wonder why up until now it's only been the cultural Left who have made
Penda's Fen their own when there's plenty in it to interest traditionalists, and gay traditionalists especially. It's very attractively shot, and the camerawork holds up well even today. And beneath its pseudo-socialist cynicism about modern British patriotism and protestant Christianity it has a deep romanticism about land and race and religion, all suffused with a quivering, sparkling, boyish sexuality that is quite beautiful. In the end it's far from perfect, but in and of itself it's a wholesome reminder that even without perfection
or purity what we have is worth having.
And it's worth holding on to.
*Again though, it is also arguable that it falls between these two stools. Like its main character, the play doesn't quite know what it wants to be.
†Which I'd have thought to most of us just means... lazy? (There's oneiric, and then there's just onanistic.)
††I mean puh-lease! Penda the pederast we could have done without! And telling gay people that they should be "secret" is something I'm quite comfortable with. But by 1974 it must have come across as a bit rum.
†††There were more of them in the Victorian-Edwardian era than most people realise. (Before there was homophobia there was Romophobia.)
††††Let's face it, there's something fundamentally silly about a classicist like Rudkin imagining to himself that he's a subversive. My own view has for a long time been that Protestantism had its roots in Lollardy which had its roots in Catharism which had its roots in Manichean Gnosticism (which itself had roots in eastern dualistic religions such as Zoroastrianism). The reason puritanism and its ideological descendants, from abolitionism to suffragism to teetotalism, seem so Manichean is because they are.
