Adaptation as Emancipation in Edward Albee’s Lolita

Edward Albee’s stage adaptation (1981) of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) is universally regarded as an unqualified failure. This contribution seeks to recover the play from critical neglect by arguing that it not just productively interprets and transforms the source text but also critically comments on its implications regarding the relationship between artist and creation, audience and art, and ethics and aesthetics. The play features an anthropomorphised equivalent to the novel’s implied author in the character of ‘A Certain Gentleman’ (ACG), a figure uniting features of (imagined) Nabokov and Albee, who introduces himself to the audience as the creator of Humbert and guides them through the plot while commenting on the action, alternatively trying to distance himself from his creation, trying to teach him moral values, or admonishing the audience to show empathy. In the interplay of Humbert, Lolita, and ACG, the play stages an emancipatory dialogue between artist and creation, using the presentational character of (epic) theatre to level diegetic hierarchies. Just as Lolita emancipates itself from Nabokov in the act of adaptation, so Humbert emancipates himself from ACG and Lolita from Humbert. In the same way, the play encourages an emancipation on the part of the audience from a position of passive spectatorship by cultivating a critical engagement with the discordant discourses of theatrical narration, presentation, and spectatorship in a dialogic of identification and distance.