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Lolita, National Theatre | reviews, news & interviews

Lolita, National Theatre

Lolita, National Theatre

Brian Cox gives us a Humbert Humbert worth grieving for

Adrian Lyne met controversy in the cinema with it head on, while Vladimir Nabokov's novel prompted one of the resounding Broadway flops of Edward Albee's stage career. (Trust me: I am among the few who caught its 1981 New York run.) So here is Lolita once more, this time filleted and distilled into a one-person show suspended somewhere between a stage reading and an actual play. Call it what you will, the result is mesmerising.

By letting Nabokov's own sly, ever-shifting narrative voice do the talking, Richard Nelson's adaptation cuts to the quick in a way that the various other Lolitas simply have not. And in a bespectacled, bearded Brian Cox, this dark material finds a near-perfect interpreter: the performance gets under your skin and stays there in much the same way as the abiding "nymphet" of Nabokov's woundingly satiric novel drives a grown man to his grave.

Well, not entirely to death's door and beyond, as it happens, in a stripped-down adaptation (Nelson doubles as director) that departs from its source by simply omitting some of the odder aspects of an enduringly strange book. That still leaves Cox centre-stage for just short of two hours, no interval, dressed in a bilious grey, his visage as rumpled as the solitary prison bed where we find him, moving occasionally to a chair as Simon Fraulo's lighting becomes ever more severe.

Such physical animation as the evening possesses comes from the play's division into the theatrical equivalent of chapters, Mike Winship's sound design amplifying the dour atmosphere of enclosure while tipping the nod to this week's other drama of incarceration, The Shawshank Redemption, soon to open at Wyndham's.

Is Cox's Humbert Humbert redeemed? To some extent given a study in psychological probity that leaves most modern-day considerations of pedophilia on the tabloid shelf. At the start, the burly, blasted person we see before us virtually exhales Lolita's name, as if the 12-year-old who goes on (and grows up) to take him over were as essential to Humbert Humbert as breath itself. And so begins a narrative picaresque that leads this apparent European sophisticate to more than a few seedy American motels before delivering Humbert into a face-off with himself. "Little limp Lo'," as he refers to Lolita, may be the overt object of desire but the play's actual topic is the devastation wrought by an erotic need that in this telling bears not a trace of the gentlemanly quality brought to the tale by James Mason in the 1962 Kubrick film.

Cox's monologue is self-consciously punctuated ("let's get on with the miserable story") in order to sustain momentum and to allow audiences to absorb the fact that they are allowed no independent view of Lolita beyond what Humbert tells them. I count it as an advantage that Lolita is left a spectral presence who comes to haunt Humbert and the playgoer in turn, Nelson's narrative compression indicating that our underage temptress is by no means entirely benign: Reported by Humbert to have referred to "the hotel where you raped me," this child-woman leaves one wondering whether she actually has any idea what so strong a verb means.

Nelson's play is consistently bleaker than a book that traffics famously in black comedy on its way to a concluding literary sleight-of-hand that the stage version understandably doesn't attempt to match. Lolita makes passing mention of "the refuge of art," perhaps by way of priming us for Alan Bennett's new play, The Habit of Art, at this same address in two months' time. But such conceptual musings pale next to the immediacy of the psychic collapse of Cox's Humbert: a grievous portrait of aberrant romance turned, crushingly, to rage.

Lolita plays Sep 14 and 21 only at the Lyttelton, National Theatre, London.

Check out what's on at the National Theatre this season

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