The Cambridge Introduction to Marcel Proust - Adam A. Watt [82]
While Pinter’s efforts intended for the big screen ended up on stage, Alan Bennett, another of Britain’s finest playwrights, dramatized a brief period from Proust’s life in an acclaimed television play, 102 boulevard Haussmann (1990), which starred Alan Bates and offers an intriguing exploration of sexuality and artistic creativity.9 Proust crops up with some regularity in Bennett’s work: he is alluded to in The History Boys and, memorably, in his recent novel The Uncommon Reader (2007), among other treasures unearthed as she discovers the joys of reading, the Queen encounters Proust: ‘really someone to whom one would have wanted to say, “O do pull your socks up.” ’10
In 1974, renowned choreographer Roland Petit created a ballet, Proust ou les intermittences du cœur, which was first performed in Marseille and is now part of the repertoire of the ballet of the Opéra national de Paris.11 The work interprets the Search in thirteen tableaux, divided into two acts and danced to music by contemporaries of Proust, such as Saint-Saëns, Debussy, Hahn and Fauré, as well as by composers he admired such as Beethoven and Wagner; it is visually stunning, beautifully executed and revitalizes through movement and music many memorable moments of the Search, as well as its central preoccupation with desire and the erotic.
A radical vision of the Search has been staged in the Netherlands by Belgian director Guy Cassiers as a tetralogy amounting to a total performance time of around twelve hours. The first instalment premiered in Rotterdam in 2003 and the final part in 2005. The four parts of the cycle (Swann’s Way, Albertine’s Way, Charlus’s Way, Proust’s Way) draw on the Search as well as other sources, such as Céleste Albaret’s memoir Monsieur Proust, and exploit video and audio technologies as much as they draw on the actors on stage. Often Proust’s long sentences move from voice to voice between different actors; words and phrases are projected on to screens, sometimes alone, sometimes overlaid on top of images. The cycle uses a Flemish translation of Proust’s novel as its script; a string quartet plays music by Debussy and Ravel, Webern and Kurtág: all in all this is a remarkably plural, multifaceted apprehension of the Search and one which has drawn large audiences in Rotterdam and on tour elsewhere in Europe.12
If these examples suggest a predominance of ‘high-art’ or ‘high-brow’ adaptations or creative apprehensions of Proust’s work, there are many others that counter this trend. In 1979 Dining with Marcel Proust appeared, a book which presents, with adjoining quotations from the novel, recipes (among many others of the period) for dishes mentioned in the Search, so those wishing to translate the page on to the plate can recreate sauce Gribiche or Nesselrode pudding at their leisure (the culinary cognoscenti were earlier apprised of the madeleine moment by Elizabeth David in her 1960 classic French Provincial Cooking).13 In the United States an off-Broadway musical based upon the Narrator’s relationship with his beloved, My Life with Albertine, opened in 2003, including numbers such as ‘My Soul Weeps’ and ‘I Need Me a Girl’. As in Cassiers’s Proust cycle the question of perspective is addressed by having two actors, one older and one younger, play the Narrator.
In 1972 the third series of the cult British comedy show Monty Python’s Flying Circus featured the ‘All England Summarize Proust Competition’, in which contestants have fifteen seconds to summarize the novel, first in swimwear, then in evening dress. For the curious and uninitiated, the sketch