(Disclaimer: We realise this isn’t the kind of show we usually review on Den of Geek, but if it helps, you could always picture the Edwardian aristocracy as Cybermen, and early 20th century disillusionment as a massive Godzilla stomping their heads off. Only if it helps though.)
When we left Christopher Tietjens at the end of last week’s episode, he was repressing his desire for lovely young idealist Valentine Wannop, bemoaning England’s fall into capitalist debauchery, and fondling an injured horse. This week sees him bereaved, reunited with errant wife Sylvia, and prophesying the outbreak of WWI with uncanny accuracy.
This instalment of Parade’s End was stalked by dread. Every subtitled date that appeared on screen drew the characters closer and closer to war, not that any of them, save brilliant Tietjens, saw it coming.
The episode’s sense of approaching doom was so pervasive it became impossible not to burden every event or object on screen with the weight of symbolism. The injured horse, Sylvia’s cracked mirror, Groby’s decorated cedar… Everything seemed so much to foreshadow catastrophe that it was difficult not to nod sagely at that predatory Fish Eagle and think, ah yes, the Fish Eagle of capitalism, poised to swoop down on the cod of service, honour, and duty…
Luckily, Parade’s End provides its own sharp slaps around the face to break you, and it, out of self-importance. Last week it was the vicarage breakfast and the Benny Hill sketch on the golf course, and this week we had Rufus Sewell’s potty clergyman wrestling his swooning wife’s brassiere off in the entrance hall, and Edith’s Scottish adventures in adultery.
While Parade’s End announces itself as proper, important drama - the kind of thing where characters can get away with giving empassioned fireside speeches on agriculture versus industrialism - it's the quality of performances and moments of absurdity that help it to avoid stodginess.
And though Stoppard’s screenplay has had to chop things about by necessity - a more faithful rendering of the novels’ experimental chronology would most likely leave an audience thoroughly disoriented - it captures the series’ shades of lunacy and tragedy deftly. The aristocratic picnic (complete with footmen, tables, chairs, and silver salvers) that saw a chap unperturbed by approaching war, but declaiming against the choice of chutney was one such example.
So, with the church deranged, society in decay, and country estates not even making their own chutney, what choice is left to English stalwart Tietjens but to sacrifice his hulking body to the God of war?
It’s not a choice popular with either his pacifist admirer Valentine, or his frustrated wife Sylvia, whom we saw struggling this week to remain chaste and be, as she puts it, fair to Christopher.
Episode two showed Sylvia dulled in comparison with the luminous peacock we met last week. Attention-grabbing bath scene aside, with no tantrums, lovers or railway carriage shenanigans, her character faded into the crowd of characters in conflict with themselves. Hall did vulnerable and soppy just as well as she does capricious and blasé, and in revealing Sylvia to be susceptible to Christopher’s charms, created the love triangle the series hinges upon.
Parade’s End is a complex pattern of individual and mass struggles. Characters struggle for monogamy, for women’s rights, for idealism and the conservation of old-fashioned values in a world of beastliness and muck. Beauty is hacked to pieces by change (the Suffragette in the National Gallery an image of that) and the fate of Tietjen’s beloved English fields and hedgerows is to be churned up by industrialism and war.
Taking all that from page to screen is ambitious to say the least, but judging by these first two episodes, the Parade's End cast and crew are managing it beautifully. Oh, and speaking of beauty, if there was a BAFTA awarded for best pronunciation of the word “aesthetes” in a period drama, Benedict Cumberbatch would walk it.
Read Louisa’s review of last week’s episode, here.
Follow our Twitter feed for faster news and bad jokes right here. And be our Facebook chum here.