Talk about squashing quarts into pint pots! Remembrance of Things Past, at the National Theatre, is an adaptation by Harold Pinter and Di Trevis of Pinter's own Proust screenplay written in 1972; and that itself, was a distillation of the 3,500 pages of Proust's oceanic novel. Yet, despite my reservations about adaptations, it works. By the end of the evening, when all the characters inhabiting Marcel's memory assemble on stage, you feel you have gained valuable insight into the nature of Proust's obsessions.
It would be pointless to bang on about what is lost. Characters and episodes from the novel are sacrificed as well as Proust's essays on time, memory, etiquette and sexuality. From the screenplay, one also loses the dense web of visual and aural references: in the film script there are 35 shots before a word is spoken, during which Pinter establishes the crucial sights and sounds that form the matrix of Marcel's memory.
Rather than dwell on what is missing, it is more profitable to ask what a staging of Proust can possi bly add to our understanding. Two things leapt out at me from Trevis's fluid and inventive production. One is the sense that Proust's narrator, Marcel, is both a participant in and observer of his own life. Even when Sebastian Harcombe's Marcel is not physically engaged in a scene, you are aware of him as a silent watcher - as if everything is leading to the play's climactic line: "It was time to begin." The stage version also heightens the aspect of Proust most often neglected, his gift for Balzacian social comedy and astute awareness of the dynamics of class.
Mercifully, Pinter and Trevis eschew buttonholing, first-person narration. But, from the start, they make it clear that we are being admitted to Marcel's memory: we get a stumble in the street, a flurry of snow, the ring of a garden-gate bell. Even if this doesn't possess the richness of the screenplay, it establishes the basic convention. Marcel's constant physical presence also reinforces the point Pinter made in his introduction to the film script - that the events shown offer a contrasting movement towards disillusion and revelation "rising to where time that was lost is found and fixed forever in art".
But theatre depends on the interaction of human beings in a confined space. By staging Proust, one heightens his awareness of social comedy and historical time. He was writing about France during the Third Republic and about the showdown between an ascendant bourgeoisie and a declining aristocracy. It was a battle of rank and status being fought out in fashionable salons. And, while some see Proust as an elitist snob, Walter Benjamin was nearer the truth when he talked of "the hardness of his work, the intransigence of a man who is ahead of his class".
This Proustian hardness is what comes out most strongly here. The opening party at the Guermantes' house in 1921 represents the vindictive triumph of the bourgeoisie: aristocrats gossip on gilt-framed chairs about death and decay, and a haggard vicomtesse staggers by high on cocaine while the newly-risen hostess engages avant-garde dancers to provide a chic cabaret.
Proust, you feel, had an equal dislike for both the declining bluebloods and the emergent bour geoisie. In Time Regained, he writes: "I had seen enough of fashionable society to know that it is there one finds real illiteracy and not, let us say, among electricians."
This version also pinpoints the emotional coarseness in smart salons. One of the best scenes comes when Duncan Bell's wonderfully melancholic Swann tells the Duchesse de Guermante he will not be able to accompany her on an Italian holiday because of his impending death; her husband is far more horrified by the discovery that the duchesse is wearing black shoes with a red dress.
But adaptation is also a form of self-revelation; and one of the themes Pinter excavates in Proust is the ultimate unknowability of the sexually desired. Marcel is haunted by Albertine's possible lesbianism and Trevis's production makes this a dominant motif. The scenes at Balbec are beautifully done, with the band of sailor-suited girls forming a playful, caressing coterie. And, after Albertine's death, Marcel's interrogation of her friend Andrée about their putative sapphism is played from multiple angles. The emphasis on male insecurity and sexual ambivalence, while deriving from Proust, echoes Pinter's Old Times.
Inevitably in a stage adaptation, it takes time for the Proustian pattern to become clear: we get fragments of Marcel's memory, which only make total sense at the end - when he itemises the sights and sounds that unlock his past and when Alison Chitty's design reveals the complete version of Vermeer's View of Delft, which has haunted the evening. But each episode is rendered with clarity and there is a clutch of fine performances from David Rintoul as a floridly dignified Baron Charlus, Fritha Goodey as Swann's faithless but beautiful Odette, Janine Duvitski as the upwardly mobile Madame Verdurin and Jill Johnson as a succession of high-chinned aristocratic snobs.
It may not be the whole of Proust; but the evening offers a vivid, lovingly created theatrical epitome that highlights his ruthless social comedy and his obsession with what Beckett called "that double-headed monster of damnation and salvation - Time".
• In rep at the Cottesloe, London SE1. Box office: 020-7452 3000.
