Benedict Cumberbatch and Rebecca Hall make Parade’s End worth the effort. Tom Stoppard’s demanding adaptation is funny, bruising and sometimes needlessly difficult to follow, with performances that keep its intelligence from becoming a barrier.
Parade’s End is worth the concentration it demands, though it sometimes makes us work harder than the drama requires. Tom Stoppard adapts Ford Madox Ford across five episodes, with Susanna White directing a cast capable of making a difficult exchange feel urgent. The pleasure is in watching intelligent people misunderstand one another, or understand perfectly and behave badly anyway. This is period drama with little interest in reassuring us that good manners indicate good character.
Benedict Cumberbatch gives Christopher Tietjens a weight that can initially look like stiffness. His reserve asks for patience, and the performance rewards it by making small changes in feeling register without announcing themselves. We came to care about him more than we expected, because that restraint makes his difficulty expressing himself painful to watch. It also presents a practical problem: the series cannot always rely on its central figure to make a crowded exchange easier to follow.
Rebecca Hall, as Sylvia Tietjens, supplies the sharpest counterweight. We laughed at her cutting remarks, then felt uneasy about how quickly we had forgiven the cruelty. She gives Sylvia such pleasure in being clever that the damage can register a beat after the joke. The performance stops the writing’s wit becoming merely decorative: there is usually someone on the receiving end. Even when the conversation is difficult to follow, she makes us attend to every word.
Adelaide Clemens’s Valentine Wannop provides welcome directness alongside those two heavily defended performances. She is particularly valuable when the dialogue threatens to become an exhibition of cleverness. Stoppard is alert to the ways a conversation can be entertaining and hurtful at once, but less dependable about making clear which information we need to retain. Some exchanges demand more reconstruction than their emotional importance warrants, and the work can interrupt our involvement just when it ought to be deepening.
Mike Eley’s cinematography and Martin Childs’s production design give the series a polish that is pleasurable without making these lives seem especially inviting. The visual formality suits characters so concerned with how they appear to others. Susanna White is most persuasive when the performances make that composure feel precarious, allowing an uncomfortable exchange to disturb our enjoyment of the period detail. Occasionally the finish is too immaculate, and people who ought to trouble us become rather comfortable to look at.
The editing by Tim Murrell, Jason Krasucki and Kristina Hetherington gives the drama some welcome jolts. Its less conventional transitions demand attention, although they can leave us sorting out connections after the actors have moved on. Dirk Brossé’s score supplies warmth when the conversation grows forbidding, helping us stay with feelings that the characters themselves find difficult to acknowledge. There is care in these choices, even when the combination of dense dialogue and uneven pace makes an episode feel longer than it should.
Compared with more reassuring period television, Parade’s End places considerable trust in our willingness to listen. Its humour matters because it makes difficult people entertaining company without requiring us to approve of them. The confusion is real, and we would not recommend treating every difficulty as proof of depth. Start it when neither of you intends to keep checking a phone; Rebecca Hall deserves to finish her sentences.
