On Parade in Edwardian England

TV REVIEW

Adaptions are always a murky business. How to bring a complex book to TV without sending avid fans into apoplexy, while conveying the material coherently to a new audience?

Parade’s End managed to solve the conundrum somewhat last Friday night (BBC2). Having read Ford Madox Ford’s tome, I was eagerly looking forward to the proposition of a five-part series. The novel’s sequence on the demise of Edwardian Britain certainly requires careful reading to get everything going on. In a similar vein, the opening episode of Tom Stoppard’s adaptation most definitely demanded my full attention, moreso because Christopher Tietjens’ (Benedict Cumberbatch) mutterings were, at times, inaudible.
Dubbed “the thinking-man’s Downton” in some quarters, audience figures have a long way to go if it is to outstrip the aforementioned juggernaut’s popularity. Downton averaged nine million viewers per episode, whereas Parade’s first episode attracted 3.5 million. Still, it was far above the average rating BBC2 pulls for that time slot so time will tell if it’s a grower.
Stoppard decided to keep the book’s penchant for jumping back and forth through time and events, but I’m not entirely sure that it worked on tv. The reasoning behind changing some of the interactions between the characters also seemed unnecessary to me. Then again, I wasn’t the one who had to condense over 800 pages into five hours – a feat of some magnitude.
The griping done with, this is, thankfully, not Downton-style schmaltz-riddled simpering. There’s little to smile about in the Samantha White-directed trip through the years before and during the First World War, as Edwardian England was on a crash course with the sobering realities of conflict and change.
It looks amazing of course. It’s beautifully shot and the slow burning aspects are delightfully teased out – past encounters are only hinted at and, in a time of such sweeping changes, issues such as the suffragette movement, poverty and the duty of care of the rich to the poor are part of everyday conversation.
The centrepiece is Cumberbatch’s Tietjens, the brilliant Home Office statistician, who, for the sake of propriety, marries the exceptionally cruel Sylvia, who seems to have made it her mission in life to torment every man she meets.
The scene when Tietjen’s quietly lulls the son he knows isn’t his to sleep is one of subtle heartbreak. Equally, when his best friend Macmaster launches into a tirade about his taking her back after she absconded to Brittany for a few months with another fella, Tietjens insists on doing the right thing and that he will himself continue to be monogamous.
“For a gentleman there is such a thing as… call it parade,” be responds.
That ‘parade’ is in jeopardy, however, after a rather amusing encounter with the feisty young suffragette, Valentine Wannop (Adelaide Clemens), on a golf course.
Rebecca Hall gives a masterclass as the haughty Sylvia, so easily bored, so out for her own amusement in life and the consequences be damned.
After deciding the little love affair with ‘Potty’ was over, she coldly tells her would-be lover, “I miss my husband. He’s a block of wood but it’s like being with a grown-up man, rather than trying to entertain a schoolboy”.
When he pulls a gun, she declares, not caring whether he is or isn’t, “I say, you’re not going to kill yourself, are you, Potty?”
Despite loathing large aspects of her husband’s personality, there is a complex love for Tietjens and she’s not likely to let the little suffragette upset the apple cart. It will be interesting to see where they take it in the next episode, but it’s definitely into the trenches for Tietjens.
Also on BBC2 but a completely different kettle of fish, Murder: Joint Enterprise, directed by The Killing’s Birger Larsen, was a thriller.
A woman was found dead in a flat in Nottingham (or Shottingham as a friend recently informed me it is also known as), with her sister Colleen barricaded in the bathroom. Later, young Stefan is pulled over for speeding in the dead girl’s car and found to have blood on his shirt. The three met that evening, so what went wrong?
In a twist from the usual whodunit crime caper, where detectives scurry around picking up the clues, it was instead a series of monologues in which the two suspects, policeman, various bystanders and a really creepy solicitor all tried to convince the audience of their version of events, to chilling effect. Being judge and jury didn’t prove to be an easy game here.
Stefan (Joe Dempsie) was the obvious culprit but when all the versions of the truth were put together, Colleen (Karla Crome) began to emerge as the not so wholesome sister while Stefan’s declarations of innocence became more convincing. When their back stories started to emerge, the sympathy cards really got played to full effect.
The ending was a bit of a let-down as all the events of what actually happened were spelled out, but it was still mind-bending stuff for a while.