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Lo and Hum embark on an odyssey across the U.S., but the restive Lolita soon arranges with Clare Quilty (Clive Revill) to escape. Quilty is a rich screenwriter and a malignant toad of a man who appears late in the novel. In the play, he does four or five turns in transparent disguises for slightly menacing comic relief, but Revill's strident hamminess inhibits laughter. Toward play's end, after a wrenching reunion visit with Lolita, now a postnymphet, 17, pregnant and happily married to a simple ex-G.I, Humbert goes forth and kills Quilty with erratic, sporadic shots from a mini-handgun in a droll murder sequence.
Since the novel used a first-person monologue in the form of diary entries, Albee took a technical gamble—and lost. He introduces a character called A Certain Gentleman (Ian Richardson) to share the burden of narration. Because the gentleman is supposedly Nabokov, Humbert Humbert's moral turpitude is diminished: he cannot, after all, defy the will of his creator. Still, it is good to have Richardson in the role, with his ironic disdain and impeccable diction. Sutherland is admirably suited to Humbert's chortling lusts and absurdity, but a trifle negligent of the character's pain. Baker, chosen after a long talent hunt for prepubescent sexpots, is disappointing as Lolita. She begins as a little girl with a lollipop and swiftly becomes a brat with a staff sergeant's mouth and no trace of dreamy allure. Alaina Wojek, as Humbert's long-lost childhood sweetheart, Annabel, seems the more likely nymphet.
Albee has taken many liberties with Nabokov without a poet's license. The author, for example, thought Freud "a Viennese quack." The playwright rings in Freudian overtones. The novel took place in the phantasmagoria of American motels. The play is confined to a stark, cumbersome set. The overriding discrepancy is not one of appearance but of style and sensibility. Nabokov's tone is sensuous, elegant and exhilarating, with champagne-carbonated wit. Albee's tone is smarmy and pompous, with humor mulled at a Dean Martin roast. George S. Kaufman was wrong. It is not always satire that closes on Saturday night; it may be pedophilia. —By T.E. Kalem. Reported by Peter Ainslie/New York