David Rudkin: Penda’s Fen Special Report from The Belfast Film Festival 
Director Alan Clarke, BBC 1973

Introduction

Rudkin along with other radical dramatists were drawing disturbing conclusions from the Wilson Labour and Heath’s Tory government’s attempt to out law opposition. This plus the rise of Powellism and the extreme right they saw as deeply worrying. A few months after Penda’s Fen was Broadcast a student Kevin Gately was battened to death in a police operation to push him and a few hundred others off he streets adjoining Red Lion Square to clear a way for the National Front to hold an election meeting. Also at this time the British Army were regularly patrolling the North of Ireland’ routinely arresting and interning people (Rudkin would later feature the North of Ireland in his next play for the BBC Artemis 81 that shows a news report of a day time gun battle). The Unions at the time of the play had also just defeated the government and its authoritarian Industrial Relations Act but not without a massive fight and effective general strike in 1972. This work is from our radical past and from a voice of a writer that will one day be allowed to speak just as forcefully and radically as it did in 1973. We still can connect to the strengths of the play’s and its fear for the future (that subsequent events have proved to be correct) which many years later still resonate with us today - the rise of the extreme right, the secrecy and bankruptcy of the nuclear state and the rapid cultural decline that marked the rise of the market.

On 10th of April David Rudkin was present for a screening of his astonishing work Penda’s Fen. Originally commissioned and broadcast as a Play for Today in 1974 it represented the peak of late 1960s/1970s artistic radicalism. Uncompromising in its technical and revolutionary ideas it is a report and warning from a Britain at the crossroads.

Rudkin like that other great 1960s radical Alan Watkins (see separate review of his feature Privilege DVD) got a foothold in the BBC. But later due to the political pressure exerted on the BBC and other broadcasters’ Rudkin – received less commissions despite the great popularity of works such as his 1972 play for radio about Roger Casement (Cries of Casement as his Bones are brought to Dublin) and Penda’s Fen which received a record response from the public when it was first broadcast in the Spring of 1974.

Born in England of an Irish mother and English father, Rudkin introduces the play from the fields before the Malvern Hills where the drama is set –– or as it is now known – Elgar country. Rudkin points across the valley and tells us that the famous hills that bound the landscape are known by names that actually contain their ancient Celtic origins and that we only assume we know the landscapes true identity. 

What Lies Beneath
 
Then we hear Elgar on the sound track matching the intense beauty of the landscape the sun begins to set, but instead of darkness falling, the image of the landscape freezes and lines of barbed wire are superimposed along the countryside’s horizon and hedge-rows, Elgar’s angel’s song has become an ear piercing scream, a bloodied hand slowly grips the barbed wire then turns and opens: title in Penda’s Fen.

This arresting opening of course refers to the landscape being something that it is not. We assume that it is pleasant and undisturbed; as we later learn it houses a government chemical weapons testing facility. But that is later, for now the scream stops and the music begins again as if nothing had happened. It is how things ought to be according to Stephen (Spenser Banks) who sits listening to the music: The Dream of Gerontius a religious work that Elgar originally composed in 1900. We then hear Stephen read from his essay on Elgar and the comfort it brings him – a work that symbolizes the stability of his mind in his own beliefs and the stability of the Christian society and culture of England or rather “England!!” as Stephen later exclaims as he denounces a documentary on Jesus in his Public School debate on the media:

 Our country England is the freest in the world.
 We have liberty of movement liberty of choice;
 Free speech, a free press. 

 We do not have political censorship. Our police
 Are not armed we do not have a secret police.

 We know that we are discussing here tonight 
 Not the media in general but one programme 
 in particular. 
 
 That one that is in every bodies mind just now.
 The so-called, TV documentary who was Jesus?
 It calls itself…“investigative theology”.
 We know in our hearts that it is atheistic and subversive trash!! 

 From this at least, on this occasion the homes of England have been saved by a timely injunction. For which we have not the abstraction of freedom itself to thank but those who exercise eternal vigilance on its behalf.
     
 [he holds up a newspaper containing a photograph of those who took out the injunction] 

 Look at this man and this woman – see if you do not see them as I see them – a mother and a father above all parents – a mother and a father of England!! Who in this modern wilderness of amorality stand up alone to uphold our erring national family on its Christian path!

David Rudkin here articulates very well the fear and loathing of the National Viewers and Listeners Association, which was active in the 1960s and ‘70s in directly challenging the BBC and other broadcasters for allowing liberal and radical programmes to be broadcast such as Denis Potters, play ‘Son of Man’ (1969) which had been broadcast as part of the BBC’s Wednesday Play Series. Following Whitehouse’s (the photo that Stephen holds up to show his class is a kinder version of what Whitehouse and her husband looked like) and the NVLA’s charge that Son of Man was blasphemous a national debate began on who was Jesus? There was not just one but many such programs debating censorship and modern “permissiveness”. This debate later intensified following the formation and launching in 1971 of the Nationwide Festival of Light and its political campaign to oppose what it regarded as modern, unchristian cultural practices. Then Rudkin gives a counter thesis to Stephens thesis. 

This is spoken by the playwright Mr Arne (Ian Hogg) who much to Stephen’s annoyance, is actually a neighbor living across the valley that bears the secret. A secret that Arne reveals in the town meeting – another political debate that was also taking place at this time in Britain in wake of the 1972 miners strike that had ended the year before and panicked the Ruling Class which led the then Prime minister Edward Heath’s often repeated charge that the unions were, “holding the country to ransom” – when the charge is repeated by a questioner at the village meeting Arne replies:

 You talk about strikers holding the country to ransom.
 What are they supposed to do play cricket?
 Besides isn’t that what government itself does?

 And by government I don’t mean those figure heads
 Who come to us every five years to get their license’s renewed.
 I mean the manipulators the fixers, the psychopaths who have real power in the land.
 
 Is it strikers who play monopoly for real with our countryside and cities? 
 Is it strikers who smash the fabric of our communities for greed?
 Is it strikers that through up in the air million after million on bungles delirium and fantasies?
 Is it strikers that pillage our earth ransack it, for quick gain to hand on nothing but dust to the      
 Children of tomorrow?

A Tory Bloodknot replies that Arne’s view lacks perspective, Arne’s reply is again worth quoting in full:

Perspective I give you:

What for example is the ultimate question for government when pondering matters of defense?
How many millions do we let get slaughtered before the reminder revolt and depose us?

After Tory Bloodknot and a degree of audience bridling he continues:

Look, not far from here is an expansive country.
You all know it well  Brumies drive out of Sunday to leave their litter there.
Poems and hymns are the sprit of this landscape – our greatest composer has enshrined it.
Farmland and pasture now an ancient fen – the earth beneath your feet feels solid there.

It is not!
Somewhere there the land is hollow.
[the camera pans over the fen land and shows us government communications  dishes]
Somewhere beneath is being constructed, something that we are not supposed to know.
A top secret, we locals are not supposed to know it’s even there.
And yet we accept it.
What is it then? -An air raid shelter to ship the population of Birmingham to in all of four minutes?
What is it then that is hidden beneath this shell of lovely earth?
Some hideous angel of technocratic death?
A alternative city for government from beneath?
Motorways there, offices, control suites, silent empty waiting for the day; telephones, computers, signaling equipment, Ministry pencils every grade of H and B, ready sharpened against the minute.

Oh, you say it must be something to protect us…
Us?
For all we know the likelihood is that our entire civilian population is marked down on some top-secret memo somewhere as strategically expendable.

When you talk of “strikers holding the country to ransom” – please think of possibilities like that!”

Our Tory Bloodknot answers the Playwright, “the British working man will never accept a dictatorship in this country – he’s too bloody minded”, something that the audience heartily applauds including Stephen who sits proudly with his mother in his public school uniform. Arne replies somewhat unconvinced, “I should dam well hope so”. 

Rudkin applies extra hindsight and foresight here in one to show us the meaning of the up coming backlash where the survival of effective trade unions and radical opposition was he thought very much in doubt. This is symbolized in the next scene of Penda’s Fen where a car of young people driving home returning from a night out stops for one of the passengers to answer a call of nature. Much delayed he returns the left side of his face and body burned off by a powerful necrotizing chemical that has turned his flesh to black smoldering pulp (Porton Down the governments chemical warfare unit was still very much in business at this time). Next we hear the young man’s mother yell his name she is stopped by a nurse at the military hospital, “I’m sorry you can’t see your son – NOBODY CAN SEE HIM!!”. But the Mother pushes her way past and into the room where her son is laying. She stands horrified at the sight of her son’s blackened body, a general a police commander and a civil servant who are sitting at the bedside look up. Later Arne talks with Stephen’s father about a report of the incident in the local paper that describes it as being caused by a, “weather balloon”. 

 Within the first twenty minutes these are just some of the “moments of truth” the play gives us. The others unfold with similar uncompromising force: Stephen begins to realize that he is something other than the honorary schoolboy ready to defend his school and his class and England.  First it is revealed to him by his subconscious in a dream that he has a serious crush on a fellow sixth former giving him cause to feel unworthy. Stephen is shown downcast at school not wishing to take part in his public school military games (he has already been told off for not playing ruger) . He tries to console himself with a bike ride through the fen but the image of a devil returns to haunt him from his dream and he crashes.  

The Culture of Today and the Atrocities Committed In Its name

The next scene presents the most difficultly for the viewer. Another dream sequence it shows Stephen approach a large “stock broker” Tudor house and garden. Stephen goes into the garden to trace the source of a curious noise. We see ‘Stepford wife’s’ families’ - women and children dressed in their summer best all wearing smiles as they calmly wait by a tree stump. Then we see what was causing the noise that Stephen had gone to investigate: it is the “stock broker” who owns the house chopping off the hands of those who have been calmly and pleasantly waiting for this to be done to them.

I spoke to the author later about this scene and asked him was this a reference to Roger Casement’s report, which details the atrocities of the rubber company in cutting off native hands (including children) that did not collect enough rubber. He replied that it wasn’t but he acknowledged the reference as he had written about Casement.  He then explained that it was a reference to the Spanish conquest of Mexico and the production line of punishments organized by the conquistadors against the locals for being heathens, the famous images of the atrocities showing the natives smiling before, during and after they had been butchered. This scene of Christian conformity is further enhanced by the arrival of the ‘Mother and Father of England’ who had done their ‘Christian duty’ and taken out the injunction against the documentary “Who was Jesus?” they now embody this nightmare and plead with Stephen to join them. Stephen jolts awake form this horror to find that the daemon of his dream is none other than the young guy (who he also quiet likes) that delivers the milk to his house and who is now helping him up from the lane and back into the world of truth, knowledge and lies.   

Stephen withdraws from the Army training core, which his a father supports but his mother (Georgine Anderson) does not and scolds him for being a slacker complaining that he may never get into university and would have to take his place at the production line “which does not stop” (they pass a factory in the car we hear the grim sound of the production line on the sound tract). But there is more disturbance and truth. Looking for the place name book in his Father’s library he finds instead documents that his father has written that tell of his father’s radical opposition to the modern church, Stephen’s father Mr Franklin a pastor (played by John Atkinson) is then heard reading the following:

To those who say blasphemy, I say blasphemy worse.
That the name of this life enhancing revolutionary Jesus
should now be tangled like a halo above a sick culture
centered on authority and death. 

This was also a programme that Terry Eagleton (unknown to the author at the time) had been involved in with the Slant group who had directly challenged the Catholic Church and the ‘failure of the Christian revolution’ (see forthcoming article Eagleton’s Island).  Later it revealed to Stephen following his eighteenth birthday that he is in fact the adopted child of foreigners. His father tries to console Stephen, “you see, you are like the English language Stephen you have foreign parents too.”    

But who now is Stephen and what can he do? The answer is he must trust himself to be himself. And as the author later explained this happens now to Stephen as a series of Real events of his and our consciousness. So sheltering from the rain he meets Elgar in abandoned overgrown aerodrome who turns out not to be the a worshipful God of his imagination but a man all to human, as he tells Stephen the great theme of Gerontious was not inspired by things heavenly but by, “the wining of a dog for its bone”. Elgar then describes being, “butchered” by a surgeon to cut out his rotten stomach. He tells Stephen the solution to his Enigma theme and says that he has, “come back to look at the world - the beautiful world”, in the moment that Stephen looks away to where Elgar is pointing the composer has disappeared. But he is now inside Stephen’s head as just another interesting human being and not unreachable standard-bearer of Englishness.  As part of this process of conscious Realism of the play Jesus is transformed into one of many revolutionary voices of and from the Fen that Stephen must listen to who have struggled over millennia to, “defend man’s ancient spark of light” as his father puts it. Stephen then asks his father, does he believe that Jesus was such a man his father replies, “I believe in the Truth”.   

But before I end on this truth, which is spoken by the playwright Mr Arne with its astonishing premonition of the Fukushima natural and nuclear disaster, I will start with Arne’s comment to Stephen’s father about the accident at the weapons testing facility and, “the lonely places our technocrats choose for their obscene experiments, like Los Alamos birth place of the Atomic bomb”. Stephen’s father replies, “the ancient Indians have venerated that for centuries as sacred ground”. But the discussion changes from one of the land not seeming to be what it is to Stephen’s father not appearing to be what he is, as he tells Arne that he is not sure which side the church has been on in the battle between darkness and light. Later he tells Stephen, who has discovered the meaning and origin of the Fen’s name ‘Penvin’ actually means Penda’s Fen the last pagan king of England to resist the Romans (a foretaste of the blood of Howard Brenton’s play The Romans in Britain which also drew an injunction from Mary Whitehouse) we have now arrived at the final Real battle of Stephen’s consciousness between the forces of light:  King Penda – the fighting king of the Fen and of Stephen’s ‘darkness’ the “Mother and Father of England” (Mary Whitehouse and her husband).  Sitting on a hillside looking across the fen, The ‘Mother and Father of England’ approach again and make one last attempt to persuade Stephen to join them and lead them in their cause. They promise him power and, “the rock of the world to turn into wealth”. He slowly but surely says he is not the one they want and tries to get away from them. They capture his image on a Polaroid camera and burn it – Stephen starts to burn like the man burned by the chemical weapon, he calls out for Penda who saves him by striking down “The Mother and Father of England” with a bolt of light. Penda calls Stephen to him and gives us the final speech of the play:

 There you have seen your true guardians of England
 Sick father and mother who would have us be children forever.
 Stephen our land must live, her deep dark flame must never die.
 Your land and my land go down into a darkness now.

 And I and all the other the guardians of her flame are driven from our home 
 up out into the  wolf’s jaw.
 But the flame still flickers in the fen 
 You are marked down to cherish that.
 
Cherish the flame so we can safely wake again.
The flame is in your hands we ‘trusted to you.
Our sacred Daemon of ungovernableness.
Cherish the flame and we shall rest easy.
[Penda places his bloodied hand on Stephen’s head]
Stephen be secret, child be strange, dark true, impure and dissonant. 
-Cherish our flame our dawn shall come.

Stephen gets up and walks down back into the Fen his struggle and ours continues. This is of course is Shakespeare’s King Lear - in reverse, for here Penda is a defender of his land and someone who fights off the invader and the destroyers of his people. And what if we don’t take his advice what then? Arne the playwright also has told what will happen. This is his warning ‘ides of March’ speech from this modern Shakespearian masterpiece: Stephen visits Arne to retrieve the place name book. Arne gives it back, Stephen asks “how’s your new play coming along, will it be outrageous – your plays often are.” Arne replies, “I make ‘em tamer now …” and he continues:

Ah the public have lost the imaginative strength they’ve had. 
Their sight and will to see what is really going on, has been steadily weakened by the entertainment barons for gain and the ‘yes’ men for cravenness.
We are not people anymore with eyes to see.
We are blind gaping holes at the end of a production line stuffing with trash.

 We are not even citizens we are dolt serfs
 -not on some great mad great wall of China project.
 Our task masters no Hitler, Stalin or Mao but our own management class.
 Their pink fact faces even begin to look alike. 
  
 There is one hope for man only: 
 When the great concrete mega city chokes the globe from pole to pole.
 It shall already have buried in some hidden crack the sacred seed 
 Of its own disintegration and collapse. 
  
 Disobedience - chaos 
 Out of those alone can some new experiment of human living be born.
 
 And now the structures of the mega city have cracked open and part of the world is in continuous revolt against their rulers. We for the moment at least are still slumbering until our fen begins to burn with anger and revolt.