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He plays an emotionally repressed, highly intelligent gentleman with a complicated line in female relationships. But Benedict Cumberbatch is swapping modern-day sleuthing to play "the last Tory" Christopher Tietjens in a new adaptation of Parade's End by Tom Stoppard.
BBC2's five-part drama based on Ford Madox Ford's tetralogy, set in 1914, marks Stoppard's return to television, with his first project for the corporation in decades.
Stoppard, although familiar with Ford's earlier novel The Good Soldier, only started reading the quartet of books after it was suggested he might adapt them. The writer, who watches television "sporadically", said he realised "damn quickly I really wanted the job".
But it was not without challenges. "The structure of the books is not linear, nor does it fall into five equal parts, it's a modernist novel with a thought towards experimentalism, and most of all, as with many adaptations, you have the problem that there's a lot of interesting stuff going on in the novel, without necessarily having the dramatic momentum or even the physical concrete dimension to it," he said at a screening of the drama.
Stoppard's involvement, and that of Bafta award-winning director Susanna White, has helped attract a cast that includes Rufus Sewell, Rupert Everett, Stephen Graham and Rebecca Hall – who plays Tietjens's socialite wife Sylvia.
Cumberbatch – much in demand in the UK and US following his role as Sherlock in the BBC1 drama – was one of only "a tiny handful" of actors who could have played Tietjens, a highly principled, brilliant government statistician, said White.
But, with Parade's End cast before Sherlock hit screens, the director and Stoppard first had to convince American broadcaster HBO, which has produced the drama with the BBC.
"HBO said 'Who is this Benedict?' and we said: 'Trust us, he's truly a great actor and by the time Parade's End comes out everyone will have heard of him," said White. "Of course now, everybody in America has heard of him and he's playing the villain in Star Trek."
Parade's End, due to broadcast later this summer, transports audiences to the end of the Edwardian era and the time of the Great War, as also have BBC1's recent adaptation of Sebastian Faulks' Birdsong, and the hugely popular second series of Downton Abbey.
"Everything changed afterwards," said Stoppard, explaining the period's importance. "It was the last period of social history among the top half of the English class system. People of a later generation might say that of 1939 – but in the case of 1914 there really is a sense of an important page being turned, never to be turned back again."
There is also a certain resonance between Tietjen's moral view of the world – central to the plot is the relationship between Tietjen and his wife, and the young suffragette Valentine Wannop – and the questions currently preoccupying society, said White.
"People are asking a lot of moral questions about how we behave as a society. About our values, the environment, money and how politicians behave … it might not be immediately obvious what an old-fashioned Tory has to say to us now, but actually I think there's a lot that chimes."