SOURCE: Wassenaar, Ingrid. “Plying the Little Phrase.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 5097 (8 December 2000): 19.

In the following review, Wassenaar applauds Pinter's stage adaptation of Marcel Proust's novel À la recherche du temps perdu. Wassenaar discusses the themes of snobbery and sexuality in both works.

Harold Pinter first wrote a screenplay version of A la recherche du temps perdu at the request of Joseph Losey, in 1972, but the film was never made. Now it has been staged, at the Royal National Theatre (in the Cottesloe), under the inspired direction of Di Trevis. The production deserves high praise. Remembrance of Things Past is a prodigal screenplay which has at last come home to the theatre.

Proust and Pinter both stage the world as a rhapsodic arrangement of scenes which build a picture of how humans are both interconnected and isolated by their desires. This picture is stitched together through minute associations, as though...