INTRODUCTION

This chapter is a personal reflection on Ken Russell’s Delius: Song of Summer (BBC, 1968) and its production from my perspective as the editor. Of all the films Ken Russell made, Song of Summer was one of the most carefully conceived and executed: the film’s discipline stems partly from respecting Eric Fenby’s 1937 memoir, Delius as I Knew Him, an approach made more likely by the fact that the author was still living. Everyone involved in Song of Summer shared in creating an authentic account of the contribution of an unassuming but gritty young man from Yorkshire to the realisation of major compositions during the final years of Delius’s life to the almost complete obliteration of his own artistic development.

Eric Fenby’s collaboration with Ken on the screenplay created a rigorous blueprint for the film since it focused so strongly on the tensions arising from Delius’s illness and inability to communicate his creative ideas, and his relationship with the willing but nervous young Fenby. The casting proved immaculately felicitous despite the complete absence of familiar faces from Ken’s previous work. The choice of Max Adrian as Delius may have seemed obvious because of his uncannily similar appearance to the composer, but his performance carried impressive gravitas even though at the time he had a reputation for comedy and revue which had tended to obscure the fact that he had been a founding member of both Peter Hall’s Royal Shakespeare Company and Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre. Maureen Pryor shared the fact with Max Adrian of being born in Ireland, but her career had none of his stardom. Instead, she was a constant as a supporting actor on stage and screen. In a way this made her ideal for the role of Jelka, a woman living in the shadow of a self-obsessed artist. The real coup in the casting, however, was Christopher Gable as Fenby.