Word: nymphets
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Leading the nymphet brigade is Aileen Quinn, 10, chosen over 9,000 other applicants for the title role. Quinn can crinkle her eyes, read her lines, sell a song, tap her toes just like a real live girl; but because she is all calculating show biz and no childlike naiveté, she impresses as a red-headed homuncula. Her elders don't fare much better. Albert Finney, who manages a scowl that comes out a secret smile, has the right moves but not the forbidding magnetism of the world's richest capitalist. Ann Reinking, a terrifically sensuous dancer...
Almost everyone has heard of Lolita 's hero, Humbert Humbert (Donald Sutherland), a richly cultured European emigre who lusts perversely and voraciously for prepubescent girls whom he calls nymphets. In the nymphet he finds an "elusive, shifty, soul-shattering, insidious charm" and something of a "demon." In a small New England town he spots his divine demon, Dolores Haze, a girl of 11½, played in this production by 24-year-old Blanche Baker...
Given the transformation of the pre-teen rump into a sex symbol in dozens of designer-jeans ads, and the popularity of "nymphet" models on Madison Ave., staging the book that coined that term once again was more good commercial sense than homage to Nabokov. Although capitalizing on this latest fashion in exploitation shouldn't have to mean joining in gleefully, through much of Lolita that's what Albee seems to be doing. Where Nabokov will choose an elegant pun, Albee lunges for the obscene gag: where Nabokov will subtly makes you think about the arbitrariness of social rules, Albee...
...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 a piece...
...Daphne de Marneffe is chillingly effective as Mrs. Bergmann, particularly on the video screen--then she is a ten-foot-tall female gargoyle, and it is clear that all hope for these children is lost. De Marneffe's triumph, though, comes later, when she plays the 14-year-old nymphet Ilse. Here she is as enormously seductive as only a pubescent art-groupie in the Village can be that enrapturing combination of loose-knit young limbs and eyes that reach down into your darkest urges. With a look and a walk she evokes the thematic center of Wedekind's play...