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.
[3] In writing The Proust Screenplay, Pinter adapted the seven volumes of Marcel Proust's magnum opus À la recherche du temps perdu for a film commissioned by the late director Joseph Losey to be directed by Losey.
[4] 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;[a] 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.
[16] Michael Bakewell adapted Pinter's screenplay into a radio play also titled The Proust Screenplay directed by Ned Chaillet and featuring Pinter as narrator, broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on 31 December 1995 and as an extended repeat on 11 May 1997.
[17] The stage version, which premiered at the Cottesloe Theatre, National Theatre on 23 November 2000 and ran there through 7 February 2001, was directed by Di Trevis and starred Sebastian Harcombe (Marcel), Duncan Bell (Charles Swann), David Rintoul (Charlus), and Fritha Goodey (Odette de Crecy).