Subject
Fw: Who's afraid of Nabokov? Surely not the Corn Exchange ...
From
Date
Body
----- Original Message -----
From: Sandy P. Klein
To: Sent: Sunday, September 08, 2002 8:25 AM
Subject: Who's afraid of Nabokov? Surely not the Corn Exchange ...
This message was originally submitted by spklein52@HOTMAIL.COM to the NABOKV-L list at LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU.------------------
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/reviews/story/0,11712,787704,00.html
Theatre
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Lolita
2 stars Peacock Theatre, Dublin
Helen Meany
Saturday September 7, 2002
The Guardian
Who's afraid of Nabokov? Surely not the Corn Exchange, the company that has taken tight hold of Edward Albee and Tennessee Williams texts and squashed them into bullets of theatrical energy? After seven years of bite-sized productions for the Dublin fringe festival, the company has graduated to a full-length co-production with the National Theatre as part of a year-long artistic partnership.
Lolita is an adaptation by Michael West of Nabokov's own screenplay version of his novel portraying the erotic yearning of middle-aged academic Humbert Humbert for Lolita, the young daughter of his landlady. It is presented in the style to which the company is committed: an expressionist variant of Commedia dell'Arte, which plays out the internal reactions and emotions of characters using exaggerated gestures and expressions, facilitated by painted masks and staccato percussion accompaniment.
It was bound to be a challenge to find a theatrical analogue for the conscious fictiveness and subtlety of Nabokov's writing - but this style is not the solution. The director, Annie Ryan, seems to sense this: the technique is used fitfully and somewhat half-heartedly. The rapid-fire pace that gives the story energy is missing here. So, crucially, is the humour, particularly in the opening scenes, when Humbert first sets eyes on Lolita and struggles between his competing desires for her presence and her mother's absence, despite fine acting from Andrew Bennett as Humbert. When the tone, voice and sensibility of the novel are missing, what we are left with is laboured narrative exposition.
Perhaps West was not given permission by the Nabokov estate to eviscerate the text in the gleefully irreverent manner of previous Corn Exchange adaptations. His reverential fidelity to the narrative sequence of Lolita creates the impression of a work that has been thinly expanded - almost to the point of boredom - rather than distilled.
Welcome levity is provided by the use of props, such as a neon hotel sign that mutates as Humbert and Lolita take to the road, and flowers and letters that materialise on cue. The energy and pace pick up in the second half, especially in the scene portraying the encounter between Humbert and Schiller, the father of Lolita's child. But it all seems a pallid reflection of its source, and in this respect shares just one thing with Nabokov: a pervasive sense of loss.
╥ Until September 28. Box office: 00 353 1 878 7222.
Guardian Unlimited ╘ Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Join the world▓s largest e-mail service with MSN Hotmail. Click Here