Film
Please note: This was screened in May 2024
Written by David Rudkin and directed by Alan Clarke, this visionary drama was first broadcast in 1974 as part of the BBC's Play for Today series.
Below the slopes of the Malvern Hills, a clergyman’s son experiences a bizarre series of encounters with angels and demons, the composer Edward Elgar and King Penda, the mythical last pagan ruler of England. These encounters – whether real or imagined – force him to question his religious beliefs, his politics and his sexuality.
"Rudkin shows the English countryside as a place, not of stale continuity and ‘old maids bicycling to holy communion through the morning mist’, but as a historical battleground in constant turmoil. It offers worm holes and geysers, fault lines that fertilise, ruptures that release energy." Sukhdev Sandhu
Part of our Curses, Cults & Covens: The Birth of British Folk Horror season, screening throughout May.