Benedict Cumberbatch: 'Parade's End': A Plum Role for Benedict Cumberbatch

By Ross Langager 26 February 2013
Quavers and Hesitations

A moment in the premiere hour of Parade’s End explains the title in one deft stroke. In the midst of a luncheon with a friend and colleague, the brilliant but conventional government statistician Christopher Tietjens (Benedict Cumberbatch) receives a letter from his free-spirited wife Sylvia (Rebecca Hall). In blunt terms, she asks his leave to come home to Britain after deserting him for a fling with another man on the Continent. As Tietjens details a grimly rational plan for reestablishing a semblance of domestic stability upon her return, his more impulsive Scottish colleague McMaster (Stephen Graham) bluntly wonders why Tietjens does not simply divorce his wife for her serial infidelity. “For a gentleman,” replies Tietjens haltingly, “there is such a thing as… call it, ‘parade’.”

The BBC/HBO miniseries, adapted from Ford Madox Ford’s epochal tetralogy of 1920s novels, goes on to depict a long “parade” of failing conventional propriety. Tom Stoppard’s teleplay amplifies the frosted, caustic wit of the British upper class while maintaining the original’s core themes. The trajectory veers towards the titular expression of finality, as the inherited privilege of the Gilded Age and vestigial Victorian behavioral codes are eclipsed by the slaughter of the First World War and the profound social changes it engendered. Tietjens embodies initially the imperial establishment’s standard of gentlemanly self-possession, gradually becoming a harbinger of its agonizing downfall.

What a plum role for Cumberbatch this Tietjens is. Launched to prominence as a beloved 21st-century Sherlock Holmes, the fantastically named English actor here slips into the skin of another furiously logical genius who struggles to connect emotionally with those closest to him. Though the role is not wholly outside of his comfort zone, Cumberbatch rarely makes the obvious choice with the character, especially when Tietjens sees action at the Front and returns with acute shell shock (very literally expressed, in one haunted monologue about the varieties of explosives used in artillery bombardment). Quavers and hesitations in his Received Pronunciation utterances bespeak a considered intellect before the trenches, afterwards suggest mental trauma, and Cumberbatch gestures to the shift without ever telegraphing it.


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