Penda's Fen
Gamma Gamaliel
Shipmate
in Epiphanies
I'd be inclined to start a thread about plays/films etc elsewhere but given the subject matter I though this one may head to Epiphanies territory.
I'd be happy for kindly Hosts or Admins to move it if it's not considered the right location or discussions don't become Epiphanous.
BBC 4 showed the 1973 play, 'Penda's Fen' last night, something of an 'art-house' classic which has been studied and lectured about as a ground-breaking piece of TV drama.
I was in my second year at comprehensive school and well remember seeing it and the discussions with my pals at school the next day. Those were the days when everyone pretty much watched the same thing and discussed it at school or work the next day.
Play For Today featured some pretty challenging material at that time, with plenty of retired colonels in Tonbridge Wells writing in outraged response.
The special effects and subject matter feel pretty clunky today but we were startled by the demon sat on the protagonist Stephen's chest and the homo-erotic dream which preceded it.
In a nutshell, and without too many spoilers I hope, priggish and pious young Stephen Franklin has to come to terms with his identity- he's adopted and his biological parents were 'foreigners' - he's gay and his adopted father, a village Rector has a fairly radical take on traditional, received Christianity.
In dreams and visions Stephen dips back to a pre-Christian pagan past to get 'permission' to express his true self beyond the structures of inherited organised religion.
Along the way we encounter a lefty playwright, strong hints of nefarious military experiments out on the 'fen', industrial unrest and the evils of corporate capitalism.
All very 1970s. All very mid-2020s.
There's even a very creepy Mary Whitehouse style Christian couple and some grisly and very unconvincing gore.
It's deservedly a classic, I think and expresses something of the zeitgeist both then and now... although I think secularism and consumerism rather than elemental paganism have eroded the old certainties.
What do you think of the play and it's legacy if indeed you have seen it?
I'd be happy for kindly Hosts or Admins to move it if it's not considered the right location or discussions don't become Epiphanous.
BBC 4 showed the 1973 play, 'Penda's Fen' last night, something of an 'art-house' classic which has been studied and lectured about as a ground-breaking piece of TV drama.
I was in my second year at comprehensive school and well remember seeing it and the discussions with my pals at school the next day. Those were the days when everyone pretty much watched the same thing and discussed it at school or work the next day.
Play For Today featured some pretty challenging material at that time, with plenty of retired colonels in Tonbridge Wells writing in outraged response.
The special effects and subject matter feel pretty clunky today but we were startled by the demon sat on the protagonist Stephen's chest and the homo-erotic dream which preceded it.
In a nutshell, and without too many spoilers I hope, priggish and pious young Stephen Franklin has to come to terms with his identity- he's adopted and his biological parents were 'foreigners' - he's gay and his adopted father, a village Rector has a fairly radical take on traditional, received Christianity.
In dreams and visions Stephen dips back to a pre-Christian pagan past to get 'permission' to express his true self beyond the structures of inherited organised religion.
Along the way we encounter a lefty playwright, strong hints of nefarious military experiments out on the 'fen', industrial unrest and the evils of corporate capitalism.
All very 1970s. All very mid-2020s.
There's even a very creepy Mary Whitehouse style Christian couple and some grisly and very unconvincing gore.
It's deservedly a classic, I think and expresses something of the zeitgeist both then and now... although I think secularism and consumerism rather than elemental paganism have eroded the old certainties.
What do you think of the play and it's legacy if indeed you have seen it?
Comments
Where does this quote come from?
I must admit I’d never heard of the play.
It is very English - specifically rather than British generically - and very odd. It had quite an impact at the time and from what I can gather is seen as quite ground-breaking in TV drama terms.
The quote is from.the play. King Penda, last pagan Anglo-Saxon king, appears to Stephen at thr end and exhorts him with those words.
People who know the play quote it to one another.
Worth watching?
I think so as a piece of TV 'history' but you might not agree once you've watched it.
To be honest, I'm surprised I'm the only one here who seems to have remembered it. There was a bit of a fuss about it at the time.
As it was a wet Sunday afternoon, I watched it. As a television play now over 50 years old, it is very much of its time. Although it is not really my sort of film, it was quite interesting. To me, the fantasy encounter with the ghost of Elgar and the related musical theme was the bit that worked best.
There were clergy a bit like that in those days, but I found Stephen's father intense and more than a trifle creepy. There was quite a lot of symbolism which I thought was a bit pretentious and where I wondered whether the symbols were actually saying anything at all or if so, quite what. I am more than a bit allergic these days to emotive nationalism, though I'm not sure to what extent I would have been then.
On balance I think Lindsay Anderson's If made a more successful attempt at expressing adolescent angst.
Something which I suspect a lot was more common in those days than now, when people generally were more repressed, was for adolescent boys to find a mother figure to confide in who was not their actual mother but therefore to whom they could talk more freely, as Stephen did with Mrs Arne. I think the film got that over rather well.