Word: nabokov
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Albee's "Certain Gentleman" repeatedly notes that his characters "seem to have a life of their own." That's the kind of banality Nabokov might put into the mouths of one of his caricatured academics; if only it were true about Donald Sutherland's Humbert Humbert. Albee draws Nabokov's nymphet-lover as an unsympathetic egotist; Sutherland act it as the stoop shouldered, pedantic stereotype of an child-molester. And he pronounces his lines--even those which Albee has mercifully lifted verbatim from the novel--as though someone has tried to wash out his mouth with soap and left...
...suitably under-ripe beauty of Blanche Baker's Lolita, Albee's penchant for moralizing asserts itself, as though, to make up for his exploitation of this theme, he decides the audience must be scolded for its interest. He chooses a moral that seems both believable, and indeed, close to Nabokov's own intentions in Lolita: Humbert's love for Lolita is the futile dream of a man doomed to try to recapture his own lost past. But Albee's Nabokov character must trudge to center-stage and tell us all this, flat out. If Albee was not playwright enough...
THERE ARE nonetheless redeeming qualities to Lolita as an evening of theater. Ian Richardson surmounts the blandness Albee packs into his lines, and though we know Nabokov would never have used a phrase like "deal with," Richardson comes close to persuading us of the possibility. William Ritman's scenery--a set of four double flats turning on hinges--subliminally recalls the flipping of a book's pages as it creates a remarkable variety of oddly-shaped stage spaces. And Frank Dunlop's direction, snappy and alert, largely neutralizes the talkiness of Albee's script, keeping attention fixed on the stage...
...best qualities of this Lolita gather in its closing scene, to end the evening of literary vampirism on an up-beat note. Albee faithfully recreates Nabokov's part-farcical, part-horrifying murder scene: as the last act of his love-obsession, Humbert tracks down and decides to kill the man who had eventually helped Lolita escape him--the effeminate playwright Clare Quilty, played by William Mooney (standing in for Clive Revill in the performance I saw). Mooney enters from the top of a long, garishly majestic stairway leading down into a scene of post-party streamers, ashtrays and drinks. Sutherland...
...this Lolita suggests very simply that Nabokov's is not a novel for the stage. In print the author can swathe the transgression he is describing in bundles of carefully selected sentences that, by explaining, defending, or indicting Humbert's obsession, make us ponder its meaning. On stage, nothing tempers the nakedness of the act; and when Albee's Lolita takes off her bathrobe to say, "Come and get it, Daddy," or buries her face in Humbert's groin, Richardson must literally draw a curtain over the scene--a comic gesture that only underscores Albee's inability to find...