Of Mud & Flame
The Penda’s Fen Sourcebook
Eds Matthew Harle & James Machin Strange Attractor Press 2019 Pb, 367pp, £16.99, illus, notes, ind, ISBN 9781907222689
In March 1974 the BBC screened a very strange play in their Play For Today slot. Pendas’s Fen almost defies précis; when I reviewed the newlyreleased BFI DVD of it here in 2016 I wrote: “Penda’s Fen is undefinable and almost indescribable. It’s a 90minute mood piece; there’s little or no storyline.” There is, but its progression is fragmentary.
Stephen, a very conservative, somewhat priggish Alevel student, is tormented by fellow pupils who realise he is gay long before he does; he has conversations with his adoptive father on Manichaeism; he encounters Penda, the last Pagan Saxon king, in the Worcestershire hills; he ultimately rejects insularity and Mary Whitehousetype constricted morality; and all to the powerful chords of Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius.
It’s more than a comingofage tale; it’s a story of awakening, of rebirth and reimagining, not just transformation but transfiguration, and of the acceptance that Englishness is something very broad, essentially mongrel, not narrow and insular: “My race is mixed, my sex is mixed, I am woman and man, and light with darkness, mixed, mixed! I am nothing special, nothing pure. I am mud and flame!” Stephen cries in the final scene.
In 2017 two Birkbeck College alumni assembled speakers for a oneday symposium on Penda’s Fen; this book is the outcome of that conference. It contains some 20 essays, mainly by academics, as well as a couple of short pieces by Rudkin, interviews with Spencer Banks, who played Stephen, and Christopher Douglas, who played another schoolboy, Honeybone, and the complete script of Penda’s Fen.
Many of the essays are illuminating; several rightly draw comparisons between Rudkin’s play and Alan Garner’s work: the untamable power of myth and landscape unleashed on presentday people. Others mention links often drawn between Penda’s Fen and “the recently canonised 1970s Folk Horror triumvirate of Witchfinder General, Blood on Satan’s Claw and The Wicker Man” – while pointing out that Rudkin himself distanced the play from Folk Horror, saying: “It’s a bloody political piece.”
Several of the essays would have benefited from an editor’s red pen, for their length or their opacity. Some writers seem more interested in their own specialisms than in the play itself. One picks up on the briefest reference to a film director in Rudkin’s script – “Now the scene is like a portrait, or a still from a Carl Dreyer film” – to write a 10page essay far more about Dreyer’s work than about Penda’s Fen. Another starts his essay by saying that a onetime TV critic of
The Listener, Raymond Williams, had left the post by the time Penda’s Fen screened, and may not even have watched it. He then launches into 17 pages all about Williams (on whom, the Notes tell us, he wrote his MA dissertation), only occasionally referring to Penda’s Fen.
But despite these caveats this is a worthwhile project; reading so many different perspectives on the play gives a host of new insights into what is still, nearly 50 years later, a remarkable piece of television history.
David V Barrett
★★★