Remembrance of Things Past is the 2000 collaborative stage adaptation by
Harold Pinter and director
Di Trevis of Harold Pinter's as-yet unproduced The Proust Screenplay (1977), a screen adaptation of À la recherche du temps perdu, the 1913–1927 seven-volume novel by
Marcel Proust.
In writing The Proust Screenplay, Pinter adapted the seven volumes of
Marcel Proust's
magnum opusÀ la recherche du temps perdu for a film commissioned by the late director
Joseph Losey to be directed by Losey (Billington, Harold Pinter 224–330). According to Pinter in conversation with Jonathan Croall and with
Michael Billington, his official biographer, Losey and Pinter were not able to find the financing for the film and there were unsurmountable casting difficulties;[4] yet, after a year's work and other cultural complications pertaining to negotiations about permission to adapt Proust's great work from principals in France, Pinter finished his first draft of the screenplay in November 1972 (Billington, Harold Pinter 224–330).
The Proust Screenplay, in Billington's view "a masterpiece ... [which] captures Proust's merciless social comedy" (Harold Pinter 230), was eventually published by Grove Press in both hardback and paperback in 1977 and by
Faber and Faber in hardback in 1978 (Baker and Ross 115–18). The stage play was published by Faber and Faber in 2000. Pinter's unpublished manuscripts for both the screenplay and the play are held in
The Harold Pinter Archive in the British Library,[5] which the
BL acquired permanently in December 2007 and planned to finish cataloguing in late 2008; the catalogue went online on 2 February 2009 and was first accessible the following day.[6][7][8]
^"Although the main problem was raising the money, there were also difficulties over casting. While Pinter wanted to use only English actors, potential backers from several European countries wanted their own actors to appear in the film. 'You could have ended up with a terrible pudding of actors speaking three thousand different dialects, in broken English,' Pinter suggests. 'I didn't like the sound of that at all' " (Pinter and Croall).
^See Merritt, "The Harold Pinter Archive in the British Library"; Gale and Hudgins; and Baker and Ross.
^Brown, "British Library's £1.1m Saves Pinter's Papers for Nation".
^British Library, "Pinter Archive Saved for the Nation" (British Library press release).
Baker, William, and John C. Ross, comp. Harold Pinter: A Bibliographical History. London:
British Library, 2005.
ISBN0-7123-4885-9 (10). New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2005.
ISBN1-58456-156-4 (10).
Gale, Steven H., and Christopher Hudgins. "The Harold Pinter Archives II: A Description of the Filmscript Materials in the Archive in the British Library". The Pinter Review: Annual Essays 1995 and 1996. Ed. Francis Gillen and Steven H. Gale. Tampa: U of Tampa P, 1997. 101-42. (Follows up article by Merritt listed below; does not include an updated version of Merritt's "Appendix"; focuses on manuscript materials relating to Pinter's screenplays.)
Merritt, Susan Hollis. "The Harold Pinter Archive in the British Library". The Pinter Review: Annual Essays 1994. Ed. Francis Gillen and Steven H. Gale. Tampa: U of Tampa P, 1994. 14-53. (Includes an Appendix listing the holdings of the Archive through 64 boxes, including the unpublished manuscripts pertaining to The Proust Screenplay: À la recherche du temps perdu, adapt. by Pinter, and Remembrance of Things Past, adapt. collaboratively from Pinter's The Proust Screenplay, by Pinter and Di Trevis.)
–––, and Jonathan Croall.
"Time Present and Time Past". National Theatre Official Website. Spring 2001. Accessed 28 Sept. 2008. ("Harold Pinter talks to Jonathan Croall about the daunting task of adapting Marcel Proust's masterpiece for the theatre.")