Tom Stoppard - Parades End

PARADES END Tom Stoppards work includes Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead , The Real Inspector Hound , Jumpers , Travesties , Night and Day , Every Good Boy Deserves Favour , After Magritte , Dirty Linen , The Real Thing , Hapgood , Arcadia , Indian Ink , The Invention of Love , the trilogy The Coast of Utopia and Rock n Roll . His radio plays include If Youre Glad Ill Be Frank , Alberts Bridge , Where Are They Now? , Artist Descending a Staircase , The Dog It Was That Died and In the Native State . Television work includes Professional Foul, Squaring the Circle and Parades End . His film credits include Empire of the Sun , Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead , which he also directed, Shakespeare in Love , Enigma and Anna Karenina . also by Tom Stoppard TOM STOPPARD: PLAY ONE
The Real Inspector Hound , After Magritte , Dirty Linen ,
New-Found-Land , Doggs Hamlet , Cahoots Macbeth TOM STOPPARD: PLAY TWO
The Dissolution of Dominic Boot , M is for Moon among
Other Things , If Youre Glad Ill Be Frank , Alberts Bridge ,
Where Are They Now? , Artist Descending a Staircase ,
The Dog it Was That Died , In the Native State, On Dover Beach TOM STOPPARD: PLAY THREE
A Separate Peace , Teeth , Another Moon Called Earth ,
Neutral Ground , Professional Foul , Squaring the Circle TOM STOPPARD: PLAY FOUR
Dalliance ( after Schnitzler ) , Undiscovered Country ( after Schnitzler ) ,
Rough Crossing ( after Molnr ) , On the Razzle ( after Nestroy ) ,
The Seagull ( after Chekhov ) TOM STOPPARD: PLAY FIVE
Arcadia , The Real Thing , Night and Day , Indian Ink , Hapgood ROSENCRANTZ AND GOLDSTERN ARE DEAD
TRAVESTIES
JUMPERS
THE INVENTION OF LOVE
THE COAST OF UTOPIA
( Voyage , Shipwreck , Salvage )
ROCK N ROLL adaptations and translations
HENRY IV ( after Pirandello )
HEROES ( after Sibleyras )
IVANOV ( after Chekhov )
THE CHERRY ORCHARD ( after Chekhov ) screenplays
SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE ( with Marc Norman )
PARADES END
( based on the novel by Ford Madox Ford ) fiction
LORD MALQUIST AND MR MOON PARADES END Tom Stoppard based on the novel by FORD MADOX FORD Grove Press New York Copyright 2012 Mammoth Screen Limited All rights reserved . No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review .

Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited . Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials . Your support of the authors rights is appreciated . Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003
or . First published in 2012 in Great Britain by Faber and Faber Limited, London Printed in the United States of America ISBN: 978-0-8021-9315-5 CAUTION: Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that Parades End is subject to a royalty . It is fully protected under the copyright laws of the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, and all British Commonwealth countries, and all countries covered by the International Copyright Union, the Pan-American Copyright Convention, and the Universal Copyright Convention .

All rights, including professional, amateur, motion picture, recitation, public reading, radio broadcasting, television, video or sound taping, all other forms of mechanical or electronic reproduction, such as information storage and retrieval systems and photocopying, and rights of translation into foreign languages, are strictly reserved. First-class professional, stock, and amateur applications for permission to perform it, and those other rights stated above, must be made in advance to United Agents, Ltd., 12-26 Lexington Street, London, W1F 0LE and paying the requisite fee, whether the play is presented for charity or gain and whether or not admission is charged. Grove Press an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. 841 Broadway New York, NY 10003 Distributed by Publishers Group West www.groveatlantic.com INTRODUCTION This dramatisation for television of Parades End by Ford Madox Ford comprises a little more than was broadcast and less than was scripted. I have included some scenes and parts of scenes which were shot but squeezed out by the running time (five one-hour episodes); and some which were scheduled but not shot because there are never enough hours in the day, especially when youre waiting for the rain to stop; and some which were cut before we began because the budget wouldnt run to them. The pincer movement of time and money had the last word.

In all this there is much to regret but nothing to complain about, given the imperatives under which broadcasters work. A play I wrote for the BBC in 1977 Professional Foul , directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg when shot and edited turned out (Im relying on memory here) to last seventy minutes, so it went out as a seventy-minute play. As it happens, seventy minutes would have done nicely for the third episode of Parades End ; in other words, I had overwritten. Since I couldnt see any reason why Episode Three shouldnt be a bit longer than the others, and not wanting to cut it, I wrote to the BBCs Head of Drama suggesting as much. Considering that my letter must have struck the Head of Drama as one of the more bizarre proposals he had ever received, his reply was a model of courteous deflection. But, in retrospect, the most strange-seeming thing about the making of Professional Foul is that I cant remember Michael or I receiving any notes from above.

We were pretty much left alone to deliver the piece; for a writer brought up in the theatre, the experience was really not very different. By contrast, in 2012 the cutting room was on the receiving end of notes from five directions six counting mine, because by the editing stage I was as prolific as anyone in my comments on successive versions. But of course I had an author-centric view of things. Everyone else was giving notes; I, on the other hand, was fulfilling my natural authorial function. The underlying difference between 1977 and 2012 was that Professional Foul was made and paid for by the BBC, while Parades End was a BBC production in a different sense. The BBC commissioned the script, and in due course commissioned an independent production company, Mammoth Screen, to make the piece.

But Parades End was always going to cost more than the BBCs ceiling for drama-per-hour, so a partnership with a foreign broadcaster, in effect an American broadcaster, was built in from the beginning as the way to go. In due course the home team went to Los Angeles to pitch Parades End to HBO. It is a truth universally acknowledged that for a British TV drama in want of an American partner, HBO is Mr Darcy. It was a great day for Parades End when HBO proved receptive. As was normal and expected, their actual commitment the cheque was conditional on approval of the director and the principal actors, but everything took a big step forward when Susanna White agreed to direct, with a fervour, luckily for us, which kept her with us against competing blandishments for a whole year before Parades End went into pre-production. My greatest debt is to her.

Parades End is a quartet of novels, or as Ford himself came to see it, a trilogy and a coda. It was Damien Timmer of Mammoth who conceived the idea that it would make a good TV drama and that I should be asked to write it. Like a lot of people, I knew Fords The Good Soldier but had not read Parades End . Subsequently I discovered that many of those who had read it cleaved to it as a favourite novel and a masterpiece. I read it at Damiens suggestion, and was converted. The story is of Christopher Tietjens, the self-proclaimed last Tory, his beautiful, disconcerting wife Sylvia, and Valentine Wannop, the virginal suffragette who completes the triangle of love among the English upper class before and during the Great War.