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Yours truly had a story today on the miniseries and the process of adapting a very long and difficult text. It meant, among other things, that I got to sip coffee with Stoppard at the Chateau Marmont while the crew set up for the Vanity Fair party. (Overall, I'd rather have a serious conversation with a major writer, so I don't mind not being invited this year.)
And here is my original ending to the piece, which will make the most sense to those who've seen most of the miniseries:
Tietjens’ wife doesn’t have
the same regard for him. Hall plays Sylvia as a lusty, restless redhead – Molly
Ringwald’s evil twin. But she’s not, Hall says, simply evil: The actress was in
awe of her character’s audacity as well as her contradictions. “I thought, if
they don’t hate me by the end of the first episode, I’m not doing my job. And
if they don’t like me by the end of the fourth episode, I’m not doing my job. I
have to play those extremes.”
The stubbornness of these three characters puts them on a
collision course that resolves in the mini-series’ last scenes. Stoppard, in
his initial meetings with the show’s producers, emphasized that this was not going
to be a war film: The war serves, instead, as a metaphor for changing times in
the same way that Crawley manor does.
“It was the war that forced British society to go through
this sea change,” he says. “In 1918 women got the vote – [though] not all of
them. Social values, moral values. All the arts kind of went berserk in the
face of the horrors that had been witnessed. And you can see how absurd it
would have seemed for Tietjens to hold onto his prewar worldview. Or his view
of himself for that matter.”
Photo credit: Nick Briggs/HBO
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