Love is a battlefield

If you think war is hell, try the battlefield of marriage. That’s the dynamic behind the HBO miniseries “Parade’s End.” The period, Edwardian England (with a sidetrip to the trenches of France during World War I), could not be more popular, as evidenced by “Downton Abbey.” The five-hour “Parade” has everything fans love about “Downton”: the observation and breach of manners and morals played out against the backdrop of history. And let’s not forget the costumes. The Tom Stoppard adaptation of the Ford Madox Ford novel ran last year on the BBC has a darker tone than the Julian Fellowes soap and adds another jewel in the acting crown of rising star Benedict Cumberbatch, who played a gay spy in “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” before going to on to hit his stride in the “Sherlock” miniseries, for which he was nominated for an Emmy last year.

Cumberbatch has his most complex role to date. Christopher Tietjens is an antique aristocrat, a truly decent chap who wears his diffidence on his sleeve and would rather be mocked, humiliated and made a figure of scandal rather than appear disloyal or otherwise defend himself in a cheap and bitter world. British actress Rebecca Hall, who was stuck having to make criminal Southie Ben Affleck seem worth her intelligence in “The Town,” is delectably repellent as Christopher’s wife, Sylvia, a gorgeous snake whose condescension and self-regard know no limits and whose annoying sing-song inflections would drive a man less controlled than Christopher to strangulation.

The only hope Christopher has for happiness is fetching suffragette Valentine Wannop, a well-meaning idealist whose name is freighted with enough meaning to set off literary smoke alarms. She is played by Australian actress Adelaide Clemens, who was so taken with Stoppard’s script that she flew herself on her own nickel to London from LA to audition and showed up in an Edwardian costume.

The story kicks off with Christopher’s biggest mistake — his marriage to social-climbing Sylvia, though she is carrying another man’s baby. Despite her constant flirting, and an extramarital liaison she conducts in France, Christopher resolves to remain faithful; his very decency is torture.

“She’s desperate to get a reaction out of him. If he flared up and told her she was a bitch, that would be something,” says director Susanna White. “In being so honorable, it’s unbearable.”

A chance encounter with Valentine promises a more sincere connection but being a gentleman, Christopher doesn’t act on it.

“It’s a love triangle,” says White, whose last project for HBO, the gritty Iraq wartime drama “Generation Kill,” could not have been more different. “What Tom did made was to make Sylvia a lot more empathetic than she is in the novel. She’s so much a prisoner of her time. Divorce is unthinkable. She expects to be noticed when she walks into a room and needs someone to tell her how much he cares for her. Because of his code of honor Christopher’s never going to lie to her. Christopher falls in love with Valentine because she’s his intellectual equal and physically attractive. She really takes him by surprise.”

Valentine, who waits and waits for Christopher even after he’s shipped off to the front (dodging bombs being preferable to living with Sylvia), may be the hardest character for modern audiences to understand.

“She’s very naive. I think she’s a virgin when we meet her. Having a boyfriend is the last thing on her mind,” says Clemens. “She’s kind of all about the cause. That’s why I think it’s really beautiful about Christopher and Valentine finding each other. There’s no way Christopher wants another relationship. Valentine is very confused by it all. I think she sees him as a companion. Throughout the course of the war she’s having a sexual awakening as she gets older. The war cheapened life.”

The war as an agent of change strips away the trappings of Edwardian society but the battlefield ultimately gives Christopher his courage. “What happens is that the world gets worse and worse. Until the world has lost the right to impose a code of behavior on him,” says Stoppard. “When you live by an outmoded code of honor, people take you to be a fool. It’s as though the war has destroyed the moral fabric of society.”

The theatrical lion, whose mantle of awards includes an Oscar (for the screenplay of “Shakespeare in Love”) and a quartet of Tonys, wanted to write “Parade’s End” after reading about 100 pages of the novel, which was originally published as four separate books between 1924 and 1928, making Ford a contemporary of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Ford uses the techniques of the time — most notably stream of consciousness — to tell his story.

“I decided not to worry about how impossible it was,” Stoppard says. “Ford wasn’t writing with an eye for a movie version. Sometimes you get a bit lost in the novel; you don’t where you are chronologically. Sometimes a character isn’t in any particular place. So I had to invent a lot of situations to keep it motoring along. I know I had to invent a lot of dialogue. All I remember is, I really enjoyed the job”

So much so that he spent a third of the 15-week shoot on the set. He watched the dailies and added bits of dialogue to his script if one of the supporting actors felt a bit adrift. “I felt very possessive,” he says. The cast was full of surprises, particularly Rupert Everett, who plays Christopher’s older brother, Mark. “I didn’t ask him to wear George Bernard Shaw’s beard, but there he was,” Stoppard says.

“Parade’s End” was a hit when it first aired in Britain — 3.5 million viewers — tuned in. “We were lucky. There was really no knowing what people were going to make of it,” White says. “It was more than I could ever wish for. People really loved it.

She won’t predict how Americans will respond. “It’s challenging. It’s more like ‘Downton Abbey’ meets ‘The Wire.’’ it’s something much more like a piece of David Simon writing. Hopefully it’s a piece of television with a long shelf life.”

PARADE’S END

Tues., Wed. and Thurs., 9 p.m., HBO