Tom stoppard, p.92
Tom Stoppard, page 92
Christopher: Yes…but still, there is…or used to be…among families of position…a certain…
Campion (stops): Well?
Christopher: On the part of the man…a certain, call it, parade!
Campion: Was there! Well, there’ll be no more parades for that regiment. It held out to the last man, but you were him.
Changing Ford’s complex narrative into concise, direct speech, while trying to be faithful to the tone of the book, was a task which he found both arduous and enjoyable.
But turning a complex narrative into an accessible, dramatic screenplay was not the only challenge. Getting Parade’s End from the page onto the air was a long, frustrating process. The BBC commissioned the script in co-production with Mammoth Screen. Once the idea had been suggested to him, he took fifteen months to write the five episodes, between 2008 and 2010. In 2010, his diary notes numerous meetings with the production team. In February he told Isabel that his Parade’s End was looking for a director.
Over the year, he sent his five episodes, one at a time as he wrote them, to Mammoth. To fund the film, which would have 110 speaking parts and 146 locations and cost £12 million, the BBC needed a co-partnership with an American broadcaster. So the giant corporation HBO came on board—with strings attached, including demands for “star directors” and big-name actors. Luckily, Susanna White, who had done a good Bleak House for the BBC, agreed to direct. She was gripped by Stoppard’s screenplay and rapidly became a devoted Fordian. Through late 2010 and 2011, Stoppard was involved in pre-production, auditioning, recce-ing locations and shooting. From August 2011 onwards, his appointment diary began to contain entries like: “Shooting hay-making, Salisbury Plain.”
But during this process, HBO pulled out, and the BBC, through its global arm, BBC Worldwide, had to raise international funding by selling the series before it was made, to European and Australian channels, while Mammoth looked for cuts in the budget. There were moments when the entire project looked vulnerable. Stoppard wrote strong letters to the BBC and Mammoth producers, Damien Timmer and Piers Wenger, resisting demands that would “disembowel” his script for financial reasons. (“To quote P. G. Wodehouse, though not disgruntled, I am far from gruntled about the hoops we are going through.”) He went for advice to his film-making friends, Kathy Kennedy and Mike Nichols, and he got involved with the fundraising, which he hadn’t had to do since the making of the film of Rosencrantz in the late 1980s. He was listed in the credits as a production executive, as well as “writer.” David Hare (who was fundraising for his own BBC project, the spy film Page Eight, at the same time) noted how frustrating Stoppard was finding it. Hare thought that he was used to being under the wing of the likes of Kennedy and Spielberg, and hadn’t realised how tough the money-raising climate in the film world had become. And, as Susanna White observed, “five hours of modernist drama was not an easy sell.”
Throughout, he was completely supportive of White. When she was sent by Mammoth to look at cheaper, and less suitable, locations in Northern Ireland, he supported her refusal to shoot there. They both knew it had to be a portrait of England, with English settings: the golf course at Rye, the Kent marshes, Gray’s Inn, the North Yorkshire moors. (Groby was mostly filmed at Duncombe Park.) The war scenes were filmed in Belgium.
They agreed on casting, too. Stoppard had visited the set of Spielberg’s War Horse in 2010, while the finances for Parade’s End were looking shaky, and seen Benedict Cumberbatch—not as yet famous—in an officer’s uniform. “That’s what I want,” he thought, before there was even a series ready to cast him in. By the time Parade’s End was ready to shoot, Sherlock had made Cumberbatch a superstar. Luckily for them, he was steadfastly committed to Tietjens, which made the money flow in much more easily. Stoppard and White both wanted Rebecca Hall as Sylvia, and they were right: her intelligent, sensual performance made the character pitiable and magnetic. Around them was a terrific cast of English actors: Roger Allam magnificently comical as General Campion, Rupert Everett as a sombre Mark Tietjens, Anne-Marie Duff an edgy, hysterical Edith Duchemin, Stephen Graham funny, touching and vain as MacMaster, Miranda Richardson a forceful Mrs. Wannop, the great Alan Howard making his last appearance as the troubled, haughty Tietjens senior, and a hilariously sinister cameo by Rufus Sewell as the mad Reverend Duchemin.
The most daring piece of casting was of Adelaide Clemens as Valentine. A young, little-known Australian actor, she was in competition with a number of more experienced names, and she had to fight for the part, flying over from LA and impressing Stoppard, especially, by “intelligently” wearing Edwardian clothes for the audition. He thought she was a “heart-breaker”; and both he and White loved her quality of fresh intense beauty and seriousness. White set up a “chemistry read” between her and Cumberbatch, which worked perfectly, and Stoppard drilled her on every word for pronunciation. He hugely admired her performance—and she would return as the heroine of The Hard Problem in its 2018 New York production.
By choice, Stoppard invested a great deal of time in Parade’s End. It was the main focus of his working life for four years. He was possessive and defensive of it, almost as if it were his own original play. This was the first time he had felt “as involved in film as in working in theatre.” Some of his team worried that Parade’s End was sucking the juice from a possible new play. Looking back, though, he would firmly resist the notion that Parade’s End was a form of displacement activity. It was something he passionately wanted to do.
He was on location regularly, whether in London, Rye or Belgium, in his long camel coat, chewing sweets, smoking, listening and watching carefully and thinking fast. He and Susanna White worked trustingly together. She found him extremely precise about dialogue, diction and physical gestures. It was he, for instance, who suggested that Janet McTeer, as Sylvia’s snooty mother, should hold up her teacup impossibly high, a perfect gesture for her imperiousness. If a few lines were suddenly needed to fill an awkward hiatus, he would scribble them there and then and give them straight to the actors. Sometimes he was exasperatingly perfectionist, trying to change bits of dialogue just before they were going to be shot, and White would have to keep him away from the actors. But Rebecca Hall, writing to thank him for Sylvia, told him it was a “godsend” that he was there on set. He would come away at the end of each day wishing they had had more time, or had been able to spend more money on the set-dressing. But in the end he was amazed by how well it worked on screen.
At every stage, he stood for the writer’s integrity, for fidelity to the spirit of the book and for aesthetic values, against financial imperatives, corporate decisions and underrating the audience’s intelligence. While the series was being cast, HBO came back on board. This was a relief, of course, but it also meant that in post-production—when he spent almost every day in the cutting room—he had to defend his script against requests for it to be made simpler and more intelligible.
He was always arguing against over-signalling. Groby Great Tree has mysterious pagan objects hanging from its branches, put there by generations of locals. Stoppard resisted this being laboriously set up: “the shot is better when the explanation is unknown and mysterious. We really, really, must resist the pressure [in exasperated caps] TO PREPARE THE AUDIENCE IN ADVANCE…The Explaining/Preparing Tendency tends to flatten out the intrinsic nature of the play. I have been fighting this for 45 years—but mostly in the theatre, where the writer has the casting vote!” He didn’t want to be constrained by what viewers might know or not know: “I don’t care about any audience who don’t know what le bon Dieu or amour means.” He was constantly telling them that Parade’s End was not a conventional story of a love triangle; it was “an oddity,” and should be kept that way: “The main character’s behaviour baffles and infuriates the people around him…Lovers don’t declare themselves. Characters are kept apart. And so on. That’s why it’s special. It’s not a ‘normal’ story.”
Sometimes the demands for clarification, handed down from the money men, were helpful to him. More often they weren’t. There were many times when he dug his heels in, usually from a horror of over-explicitness. And there were times when he didn’t, but felt he should have done. Tietjens senior, before the war, gazing from Groby terrace at the fields where a horse-drawn plough is working, says: “The motor-plough didn’t answer.” This was exactly what Ford wrote. (When Christopher goes back to Groby after the war, we see a motor-plough in action in the fields: the old ways have gone.) He was told that this word wouldn’t be understood, and reluctantly agreed to change it to “The motor-plough didn’t serve.” “I loved ‘answer’ for being precise to the old-school ways of the character, but I got tired of fighting for it.” And for him to say to the producers, “I know half the audience may not understand this, but I’m writing for the other half,” was perhaps not even a respectable view to take. Another writer might just have told them to fuck off. But that didn’t occur to him, because he was not that kind of writer, or that kind of person. Sometimes he thought he should have been.
He was profoundly committed to the fortunes of Parade’s End, and did a lot of publicity for it at the time of the first screening in February 2012. The series was aired between 24 August and 21 September 2012. Some critics wondered why on earth the BBC chose to put it out in the dog days of summer, but he kept his counsel. He held a celebratory party at Chelsea Harbour for everyone involved when episode five was screened.
Stoppard’s “return to television after thirty-five years” was celebrated, and Parade’s End was a big critical success, generally acclaimed as “something rare and wonderful.” The first episode had 3.5 million viewers, a figure which dropped off during the course of the series, with some complaints about inaudibility. “Parade’s End Loved by Critics, but Viewers Switch Off,” one headline read. Coincidentally, by the time it came out, Downton Abbey (which didn’t exist when Stoppard had begun work on Ford) was having its third series. So everyone compared Parade’s End with it, along the lines of “the thinking person’s Downton Abbey” or, more positively, “Stoppard’s glorious gem puts Downton to shame.” Exasperated with the assumption that Parade’s End was just another cosy Edwardian costume drama, Susanna White said that viewers could go and make themselves a cup of tea during Downton Abbey and come back and pick it up easily, but that if you went out to make a cup of tea during an episode of Parade’s End, you’d be lost. (She also said that it was like Downton Abbey crossed with The Wire.) In terms of popular success, Downton Abbey, targeted at a mass audience and averaging about 13.3 million viewers a week, made mincemeat of Parade’s End. But in terms of critical reputation, Parade’s End left Downton Abbey nowhere.
He was especially pleased to get approval from a devoted and knowledgeable Fordian such as Julian Barnes. On 11 September 2012 Stoppard wrote to Barnes from his “thatched bolt-hole” in Shalden, thanking him for his phone call about the series. “You probably don’t know how much your message meant to me and to Susanna,” the playwright told the novelist. “We outed each other afterwards as highly Barnes-sensitive about Parade’s End, each silently anxious about whatever opinion you might have about it.” And he sent him the published screenplay with the inscription: “To Julian—my Parade’s End conscience—with love, Tom.” He was pleased, too, that Max Saunders, Ford’s latest biographer, admired his version and thought that he had reintroduced “a new generation of readers to this amazing, expansive, and deeply moving work.” Thanking Saunders for his advice, he told him: “I loved the job but I think it was the most difficult job I ever had to do.”
In the spring of 2013, five years after he first read Parade’s End, Stoppard attended a TV film festival in Paris, Séries Mania, at which the first two episodes of the French TV version of Parade’s End were shown. Here he had a horrid surprise. He was enraged to realise, belatedly, that BBC Worldwide had sold the series to European and Australian TV without regard to the fact there was no drama slot longer than forty-five minutes on those channels. The five hour-long episodes he had written had each been carefully structured to contain one coherent part of the story, with time lapses between each episode. But in the French Arte version the episodes had been sliced, arbitrarily, into six forty-five-minute slots. He felt at that moment it would have been better for Parade’s End not to have been made at all, rather than having been “butchered” for demeaning financial imperatives. Interviewed by French reporters at the festival, under the shadow of this upsetting discovery, he struck an unusually gloomy note. He might write one more play and give up, he told them, because he was very slow. “I am seventy-five, I am seventy-six in a minute…My brain cells are dying in their trillions.” After a while, his fury wore off. Generally stoical rather than excitable, “I shrugged, and got on with my life.” Perhaps, he thought later, he might have done better to have written it and then finished with it, fatalistically saying to himself, “Let whatever will be, be.” After all, though two or three million people watched it, it then vanished from sight. (Except, that is, on DVD and Netflix.) No one would ever set it alongside The Real Thing or Arcadia in a history of his work. Nevertheless, he minded about Parade’s End, and was rightly proud of it.
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Just after he finished writing Parade’s End, he was asked to do a screenplay of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, at the suggestion of the director Joe Wright, who had adapted Pride and Prejudice and Ian McEwan’s Atonement. Keira Knightley starred, as in those films, with Jude Law as Karenin. The two film projects overlapped: for instance, on 30 August 2011, there was a read-through of Parade’s End and a rehearsal of Anna Karenina. Both were adaptations of big, classic novels about society, adultery, marriage and, above all, love. But the resemblances stopped there. This was a very different level of involvement for him. He did his homework, of course, watching the many film versions of Anna Karenina, rereading the novel in the Penguin translation and drawing clear lines between the three main plots: Anna’s passionate, doomed adultery with Captain Vronsky, which wrecks her loveless marriage to the chilly bureaucrat Karenin, divides her from her beloved son and leads to her tragic suicide; her worldly brother Oblonsky’s casual infidelities in his marriage to the long-suffering Dolly; and the deep, slow-moving relationship between Dolly’s sister, the innocent Kitty, and the idealistic landowner Levin. His script concentrated on the novel’s different versions of love, rather than on its political and philosophical side, though he gave space to Levin’s revolutionary brother, who accuses the serf-owning Levin of being “on the wrong side of history.” He had a fondness for some of the minor characters, like Princess Betsy’s husband, whom he turned from a collector of etchings to a specialist in antiquarian books, because “I prefer antiquarian books to etchings.” He gave strong, modern expression to Anna’s social imprisonment within the double standards of her time and to the predicaments of all the women characters. Speaking of her own scandalous love life, Vronsky’s mother says to Anna: “I’d rather end up wishing I hadn’t than end up wishing I had.” Anna says to Vronsky, when she knows she will lose her son if she runs away with him: “The laws are made by husbands and fathers.” And a friend of Vronsky’s explains to him why he can’t acknowledge Anna in public: “I’d call on her if she’d only broken the law. But she broke the rules.” There are feminist sympathies in both these adaptations.
He had no idea what Joe Wright was going to do with it, and nor did Wright, at first, who spent a long time in Russia looking for suitable locations. In the end Wright got impatient with the conventional precedents and decided to stage it in a dilapidated “Russian” theatre, built in Shepperton, and to have most of the action (apart from the rural scenes) take place in different areas of the theatre, with mannered, co-ordinated choreography and almost continuous “Russian” music, so that at times it’s more like a musical or a ballet. This decision had nothing to do with Stoppard, and came as something of a shock to him. “I wrote it ‘straight,’ ” he told his friend the dance critic Alastair Macaulay, “the modernist narrative-frame being imposed on it later.” But he called Wright’s conception bold and rewarding.
He showed up very occasionally on the set. He was there for the filming of Anna throwing herself under the train, and suggested one new line to Knightley in mid-shoot, which she accepted. The film was released to moderately good reviews in September 2012, just as the Parade’s End airings were ending. Some critics found what Peter Bradshaw called the “semi-permeable fantasy theatre” a problem. Philip French thought the film “only occasionally touching, and rarely truly moving.” The New Yorker critic called it banal, fussy, flat, “simultaneously simplistic and overdone.” Stoppard passed no judgement, but said in interview that compared with Anna Karenina, Parade’s End felt much more like his own work.
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The years of Parade’s End took him into his mid-seventies. He was living alone, working with unremitting energy, always in touch with family and friends, looked after by his faithful team, hugely in demand, greedy for quiet thinking time, at once private and famous. Younger friends and colleagues, like Sonia Friedman, Patrick Marber, Daniel Kehlmann, Adam Thirlwell or David Leveaux, brought new interests into his life; his established friendships, as with Antonia Fraser, the Johnsons, Mike Nichols, Jack O’Brien and very many others, were steadily and affectionately sustained.
His favourite actor and long-time collaborator John Wood died at eighty-one, in August 2011. He spoke humorously and lovingly at his memorial (a major theatrical event in the “Actors’ Church” in Covent Garden in July 2012) about his haughty and ascetic character, his fearsome cleverness and scathing wit. Wood, he said, seemed to know something about everything and everything about something. He was a fanatical perfectionist, often giving notes to other actors, sometimes while they were on stage, as to Rosencrantz when Wood was playing Guildenstern. Nicholas Hytner recalled that at one performance of Travesties to a dozy matinee audience, Wood turned to them and expostulated: “Oh, do keep up!” Simon Russell Beale read a speech from that play; and at the end of the ceremony they listened in awe to Wood’s recording of Prospero’s farewell “in which,” as one listener described it, “that mighty, metallic voice let rip over several octaves.”
