The essence of Proust

Back in 1980, before she switched from acting to directing, Di Trevis played the beautiful Odette in a previous Proust adaptation, A Waste of Time (a nonchalant title Proust would have relished) at the Glasgow Citizens.

That version, directed and designed by Philip Prowse, was not only visually stunning but also a haunting anatomy of a central Proustian theme, the power of memory. It began at the point toward the novel's close when the narrator Marcel re-enters society, looking back over his life at the Belle Epoque reception. For the RNT production, Pinter and Trevis take a different approach. Writing originally for the cinema, Pinter could use devices such as dissolves, flashbacks and jump-cuts, well suited to the shifting time-scale of the novel. He and Trevis recognise that Proust saw his life as possessing the shape of a work of art and that his masterpiece is partly a creative autobiography.

Trevis came across the published screenplay when unpacking books in her French home and when invited later by Peter James, principal of Lamda, to work on a student project, she chose Pinter's script, "adapting it for the exigencies of the staging". A single performance of this workshop for an invited audience, "deliberately including people who'd never read the novel", convinced her that the project had potential.

A subsequent meeting with Pinter, who had not seen the Lamda showing, included "the happy coincidence" of his room having in it a postcard of Vermeer's View of Delft (a detail of which is a key Proustian image) and spurred them into taking the idea further. Then Trevor Nunn invited Trevis to work on a Cottesloe version. "I was anxious to avoid a treatment that becomes a screenplay manqué" says Trevis. The rehearsal script reads like a piece of total theatre, fusing the text with images, light, movement, sound and music - the latter overseen by her husband Dominic Muldowney, a regular Pinter collaborator. Designer Alison Chitty has used Nadar photographs as references "to make a physical world and space for the play; the art is in finding the way to express the elusive, the recalled ideas and the premonitory."

The aim is "a distillation of Proust" rather than a literal adaptation. And despite the inevitable major cuts and transpositions it encompasses an impressive amount of the novel's panorama as it ranges from the child Marcel's lost domains of Combray and Balbec to the glittering salons of the Faubourg Saint-Germain to the seedy brothels of the Rue Marigny.

It should remind people that Proust - like Pinter - can be a wonderfully funny writer, with scenes of high social comedy contained in his scrutiny of sexual politics and snobbery. The production catches the book's simmering subtext of social and sexual violence which the Jewish, homosexual Proust observed so well. As Baron de Charlus says to Marcel (words that surely resonate for Pinter too) - "You are a writer É you are interested therefore in the complex and mysterious tissues of human nature."