The remembrance of Proust

The Proust addicts will come out in force to see the stage production at the Cottesloe of Remembrance of Things Past.

Hooray, they've kept the Scott Moncrieff title! But this in itself is a reminder that what we are about to see is an extraordinary palimpsest. Proust writes his book, and then, very laboriously, rewrites it, dying before it is finished. Scott Moncrieff, during the 1920s, translates it into marvellously camp English prose. In many ways, he improved it. Then in 1972, Harold Pinter wrote a screenplay of the huge Scott Moncrieff translation for Joseph Losey, reducing Proust's millions of words to 455 shots. This in itself was a pretty extraordinary thing to want to do. It has to be said that it seems a very clever adaptation and one is sorry the film never got made. But then there is the further transition - director Di Trevis adapts Pinter's screenplay for the stage, and makes it into the present theatrical experience. That's a hell of a lot of translating, from language to language, from medium to medium.

The addicts will instantaneously recognise all the scenes which Pinter/Travis have dramatised, and the few they have ham-fistedly invented. One of the best scenes Proust ever imagined was that of the Duchesse de Guermantes's red shoes. M. Swann, it will be remembered, calls on the Guermantes just when they are in a hurry to go out to dinner. They have not seen him for some time and the Duchesse implores him to come to Italy with them in the spring. Swann replies that it will be impossible because he is unwell. Surely he'll be better by the spring? The situation forces Swann to confess that he will actually be dead by then. Meanwhile, the Duc is hurrying his wife for their dinner engagement and fixes on the fact that she is wearing black shoes with a red dress. He sends her back to change. As they rush to their carriage, the Duc calls back to Swann in a loud, hearty voice, "Don't let yourself be taken in by doctors' nonsense, damn them. You'll live to bury us all."

They did this scene terribly well at the Cottesloe. It is a little play in itself - Swann's delicacy, his secretiveness, his air of tragedy all encapsulated: Swann's (and the narrator's) twin need for the double but incompatible fix of intellectual stimulation and the companionship of aristocratic airheads. The actor playing the Duc, John Bett, seemed to have modelled himself - this is intended as a compliment to them both - on Sir Reresby Sitwell. The Duchesse was instantly recognisable as the character from the book. Swann (Duncan Bell) was to my eyes a better Swann than the actor in the recent film.

On the whole, the casting was brilliant. I shall be tiresome in love for a few weeks with Mlle Vinteuil (Marina Morgan). There were particularly strong performances from Jill Johnson as the Marquise de Villeparisis, Julie Legrand as the narrator's mother and Judy Campbell as the grandmother. The Jeunes Filles en Fleurs were all almost embarrassingly beautiful and this must be the only theatrical performance where the sex was rendered with sheer brilliance.

Class is always impossible for actors to get right. The audiences will love David Rintoul's spirited Charlus but he seemed about as aristocratic as a housemaster at a minor public school. The only real disaster, though, was Janine Duvitski - of TV fame - whose rendition of Mme Verdurin was indistinguishable from her Mike Leigh performances. Mme Verdurin is one of the great comic figures in all literature, with her salon, her ghastly parties, her social ambitions. She is meant to be vulgar and pretentious but not common as muck. There is meant to be shock, in the final novel, when Mme Verdurin remarries and becomes the Princesse de Guermantes: but no member of the haughty Guermantes tribe would allow Duvitski in as a scullery maid, let alone as the Princesse.

The question which I kept asking myself all through the evening was: would any of this make sense if you hadn't read the book? There isn't really a plot to A la recherche and, without the narrative voice as the unifying gel, how can it ever avoid being just a series of vignettes?

So, while it will fascinate Proust addicts - many of whom will disagree with this or that interpretation - I found it hard to know whether it stands on its own as a play.