Stroud festival is a celebration of the British esoteric, from Morris Dancing to Jarvis. My friends’ film the Ballad of Shirley Collins played, as well as Penda’s Fen. This came from the BBC cycle The Play for Today, which ran for 15 years or so and was once a seedbed both for British dramatic talent and also, as Penda’s Fen shows, for the subversive. The 90 minute film is a coming of age tale which follows Stephen, who lives in the remote Worcestershire countryside. Stephen has to come to terms with the fact that he’s gay, and that he’s not the vicar’s son he believed himself to be. Directed by Alan Clarke, David Rudkin’s script is in many ways a fascinating treatise on Britain in the seventies, with references to dark political forces, industrial pollution and homophobia. It features dream sequences with Edward Elgar and King Penda himself. It is also, from a screenwriting point of view, a fascinating argument both for and against development. Whilst Stephen’s journey lends the narrative a central pillar, the film is messy, with a super-abundance of ideas which don’t always cohere. However, the very existence of these ideas is what makes the film unique, and still watched on a cult level fifty years later. Somewhere in the middle might be the perfect movie, but of course perfect movies have never existed, not even in Arthurian Britain.
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