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.