Don't Rain On This Parade's End

By Gwen Orel

Did you know that in the early 20th Century, English Catholics would often travel with their priest, who was often Irish?

Neither did I, until I saw Parade's End.

Neither did director Susanna White, until she read Ford Madox Ford's series of novels and the scripts for the HBO mini-series written by Sir Tom Stoppard. The five-part series debuts in America tonight, Tuesday, February 26, and concludes Thursday, February 28.

If you haven't had enough of the Downton Abbey era here's a bit more of it. Like the characters in Julian Fellowe's nighttime soap, the people in Parade's End span World War I, and they often wear gorgeous clothing. This series is written by arguably the world's greatest living playwright (hint: nobody is going to die to get out of a contract), and is based on the work of an author considered to be one of the greatest in the English language. The cast includes Benedict Cumberbatch (Sherlock; War Horse); Janet McTeer (Albert Nobbs); Miranda Richardson (The Lost Prince). It's funny, pretty, appalling, and unforgettable.

Ned Dennehy plays Father Consett, an Irish priest. He travels with Mrs. Satterthwaite, played by Janet McTeer, and her daughter Sylvia Tietjens, played by Rebecca Hall (daughter of British director Sir Peter Hall), and serves as the conscience to the beautiful, flirtatious Sylvia, who's married to Benedict Cumberbatch's undemonstrative, honorable government official Christopher Tietjens.

Yet while the priest is the conscience of the English Catholics, he may well be a spy for the Germans.

When Sylvia tells her estranged husband that the priest has been executed, she says it was hushed up because all of the witnesses were Ulstermen. "And yet I may not say this is an accursed war," Sylvia says bitterly.

It's a chilling reminder of how complex war can be. If in Downton Abbey the war almost seemed mostly muddy, in Ford's novels it's the shock that changed society forever. Christopher's determination not to divorce the woman who abandoned him for a lover and returned, a woman he still loves, though he has also fallen for a suffragette, is a code of honor no longer relevant in a changed world. Rather than being admired for his standards, this "parade," as Christopher calls it, is his undoing on every level.

We spoke to director White last week by telephone to her home in London.

White has directed period dramas before, with the BBC's Bleak House and Jane Eyre, and an episode of HBO's Boardwalk Empire. She's also directed the war drama Generation Kill, a series about the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, also on HBO.

What drew White to Parade's End, she said, was "the combination of the epic sweep of it and the opportunity to the story of these characters' lives, over 10 years, at such a crucial point in history, told with such humor by Tom, who has created an irresistible combination of emotion and humor.

"On one level it's a political historical story. On another level it's a universal love triangle of a man who's married to one woman and who falls in love with someone else, and what do you do in that situation when you've been brought up with a code of honor."

Rebecca Hall's Sylvia is playful, beautiful, awful, and sad. She wears a St. Anthony medal, and spends time in a convent. Like Scarlett O'Hara to Rhett Butler, she loves Christopher much more than she knows. Adelaide Clemens' young suffragette, Valentine, has advanced ideas about equality but is otherwise an innocent.

In the book, White said, the portrait of Sylvia is much crueler than what is in Stoppard's scripts. "Ford was trapped in an unhappy marriage himself, and was in love with someone else, so there is a fair amount of vitriol toward Sylvia on the page."

In one scene, Christopher arrives late to a party and Sylvia is dancing. When she sees him she calls his name joyfully - but he doesn't respond.

"He's so cross when he gets to the party," White explains. "He sees the guy he was made to lie for at the office. He's preoccupied with that, and also he sees her dancing with another man. Flirting. And he doesn't like modern music, and they're playing the latest kind of jazz. He's a bit of a fuddy-duddy. He says, 'I will dance with you when there's a tune,' and he means that. There are always a lot of things going on in the scene at once."

Did being a woman directing this complex drama affect how complex the portraits are?

White, who had wanted to be a director since visiting a television game show with her Brownie troop when she was 7, said she didn't really think of herself as a woman director until she directed Generation Kill, and she heard remarks about a woman helming a story about the marines.

"Maybe women are less fired up by testosterone around 'action,' and have a calmer approach, and just analyze more of what's going on emotionally," she speculated.

"When you're directing you pull out the scenes that interest you most. If a man had directed Parade's End, it might have had more emphasis on the economy, or explosions of the First World War. What spoke to me was that big scene of the women's movement. Valentine's campaigning for the vote, for married women over 30, not even the vote for all women - that is practically within living memory. It's such recent history.

"I found myself very moved. The big suffragette riot, normally I would leave that kind of background action to the assistant director, but I found myself explaining it to the women in the crowd. I would explain to Adelaide what it was like for her character. She's the face of the future."

White pulled nuanced performances from the men as well. We see men stretched to the breaking point. "They were trying to hang onto their sanity in a very British upper class way, like translating a sonnet into Latin," White said.

The war scenes are brutal. The trenches are squalid, and claustrophobic.

"When researching it, Stephen Spielberg was filming War Horse," White recalled. "I went down to the set and he had these huge, wonderful trenches, that were wide enough to have a galloping horse and a tracking vehicle running beside it. I knew there was no way we could compete with that. I went to the Imperial War Museum and did research that showed a lot of the trenches were just narrow enough for two men to squeeze past each other.

"I read accounts and diaries of people in the First World War, who talk about sitting around and then there's this frantic action. In many ways that's what's so terrifying. You go from boredom to danger of annihilation in a heartbeat."

With 160 sets, 110 actors and 15 weeks to shoot the five-part series, White had to operate on all cylinders.

Yet toughest scenes to film were often the quiet ones. "As the director, you have to experience it emotionally. When Sylvia comes back on New Year's Eve and sees the light on and thinks Christopher's come back and it's not him, but her maid, you really feel that at the end of the day. You feel you've lived through the emotions."

The viewer does as well.

Gwen Orel runs the blog and podcast New York Irish Arts