Tom Stoppard returns to BBC with Ford Madox Ford adaptation

Playwright’s five-part BBC2 version of the first world war story Parade’s End will be his first projects for corporation since 1970s

Tom Stoppard is returning to the BBC after a long absence by writing the screenplay for a five-part drama set during the first world war.

BBC2 has persuaded the playwright to dramatise the Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End, a four-book series set in England and on the Western Front.

The last Stoppard projects for the BBC were plays in the 1970s, including Professional Foul, about a Cambridge don whose visit to Prague is hijacked by communism.

Ford’s tetralogy, published between 1924 and 1928, established him as one of the country’s finest novelists. He died in 1939. Stoppard is reported to be hopeful that the BBC2 drama will restore Ford’s reputation, placing him alongside authors like DH Lawrence and Evelyn Waugh in the pantheon of early 20th century greats.

Ben Stephenson, head of drama commissioning at the BBC, told the Independent: “Tom Stoppard is without a doubt one of the world’s finest writers and we are thrilled to welcome him to the BBC with his extraordinary, witty and hugely complex take on a complex work.”

It will be made by the London-based production company Mammoth Screen but it is not yet clear when it will be screened.