Dis­cov­er the hid­den his­to­ry of this sub­ver­sive ​’70s coming-of-ager

“Father, do you think dreams come true?” asks Stephen (Spencer Banks) in Penda’s Fen, David Rudkin’s 1974 tele­play for the BBC direct­ed by Alan Clarke. ​“Don’t come true. They are true,” replies Stephen’s father, Rev­erend Franklin (John Atkin­son). ​“Your dreams tell you a truth about your­self. A truth you hide from while you’re awake. A truth you need to know about your­self for your well-being. This buried truth comes up in your head while you’re asleep, ris­ing to act itself out like a play. That’s the respon­si­bil­i­ty of the dream­er, Stephen: to acknowl­edge that truth about your­self that the dream reveals, then act upon that truth. Believ­ers would call such a dream ​‘voice from God’.”

In his wak­ing hours, 17-year-old Stephen is brim­ming with cer­tain­ties. He is a son of Eng­land, believ­ing pas­sion­ate­ly in God and coun­try, in order and the estab­lish­ment (as embod­ied by the reg­i­ment­ed prac­tices of the all-boys’ school he attends). He sup­ports a mar­ried cou­ple (from a Fes­ti­val of Light-like organ­i­sa­tion) who have cam­paigned against ​“athe­is­tic and sub­ver­sive trash” in the media. He regards his neigh­bour, Arne (Ian Hogg), a left­ist, anti-author­i­tar­i­an fire­brand who also writes ​‘out­ra­geous’ plays for tele­vi­sion, as ​“unnat­ur­al” in both his polit­i­cal views and his child­less­ness. Stephen is con­ser­v­a­tive, at least with a small c, and looks upon any kind of recal­ci­trance or dis­si­dence with suspicion.

Yet there are ear­ly cracks in the pro­fessed cer­tain­ties of this odd, arro­gant boy, appear­ing as signs of unruli­ness to come. Stephen adores ​‘The Dream of Geron­tius’, a mys­tic ora­to­rio writ­ten by late local com­pos­er Sir Edward Elgar, but admires its ​‘dis­so­nance’ (which he describes as ​“the pierc­ing glance of God”) as much as its more order­ly har­mon­ic sec­tions. He is proud, indeed con­sid­ers it his patri­ot­ic duty (at the height of the Cold War), to wear his corporal’s uni­form dur­ing school mil­i­tary exer­cis­es – but is telling­ly dressed down by a teacher for the untidi­ness of his clothes, as though they are not real­ly a prop­er fit for the teen. At first drawn to Manichaeism because its dual­is­tic moral­i­ty appears to mir­ror his own way of see­ing every­thing in black and white, he is soon as much attract­ed as repelled by its hereti­cal nature, and sur­prised to learn that his own father, though par­son in the near­by church, does not sim­ply reject its unortho­dox tenets.

Then there is Stephen’s sex­u­al iden­ti­ty. Although it is obvi­ous to both his par­ents that he har­bours nascent long­ings for the milk boy, Joel (Ron Smer­czak), it takes a dream (of an angel, a demon, and sev­er­al scrum­ming school­boys) to reveal to Stephen the truth of his homo­sex­u­al­i­ty. With the ground shift­ing beneath his feet, and all the main­stays of his life – even, at his 18^th birth­day, his very Eng­lish­ness – falling away, Stephen’s dreams (of Elgar dis­cussing secret codes in his music, of pagan rit­u­al sac­ri­fice, of ancient res­ur­rect­ed Kings) will con­tin­ue point­ing to a divid­ed, less dog­mat­ic self, as he at last opens him­self to a more com­plex truth about his own com­pli­cat­ed iden­ti­ty, and a less blink­ered, more panoram­ic vision of England.

As Stephen comes crash­ing into his late ado­les­cence and a very dif­fer­ent adult path, the West Mid­lands coun­try­side that is his milieu will also reveal a hid­den his­to­ry not marked in cur­rent maps or on street signs. So it is that Rudkin’s com­ing-of-age pagan pas­toral is also a non-con­formist chron­i­cle of secret Eng­land, where bound­aries – geo­graph­i­cal, polit­i­cal, spir­i­tu­al – are con­stant­ly being redrawn but for­ev­er leav­ing their trace. The film’s final injunc­tion to ​“be secret, child, be strange – dark, true, impure, dis­so­nant” is a plea for a new (yet old) Albion, root­ed in alter­i­ty, with Stephen as its lat­est mes­si­ah, or at least scribe, in an end­less Manichaean strug­gle with both the world and himself.

Com­bin­ing rites of pas­sage with state of the nation, Penda’s Fen is stag­ger­ing in its rich­ness and ambi­tion, and with­out prece­dent for the way that it under­mines and queers its own idyll of 20^th cen­tu­ry Eng­land. It is, as the quote with which this review began sug­gests, a wordy affair, but it is also full of oneir­ic images and sub­ver­sive ideas. Despite the leg­endary rep­u­ta­tion that it has acquired from its 1974 broad­cast on BBC One’s Play for Today (and a sin­gle repeat on Chan­nel 4 in 1990), Penda’s Fen has nev­er, till now, been made avail­able in any for­mat for the home mar­ket – so for lovers of British film at its most eccen­tric and out­ra­geous, this HD release from BFI is a dream come true.

Penda’s Fen is released for the very first time on Blu-ray and DVD on 23 May cour­tesy of the BFI.