LOLITA Guest Artistic Director

Staggeringly great performances, direction, writing and mood. – David Lynch Stanley Kubrick’s early adaptation of Nabokov’s famous novel – wherein a middle-aged professor becomes sexually obsessed with a pubescent girl – was mode during a time of intense British censorship, but remains provocative, funny and chilling in equal measure Unlike Kubrick’s later sweepingly monumental productions, LOLITA exhibits a mainstream restraint that paradoxically intensifies the neuroses on display: Jomes Mason’s brittle pathos, Shelley Winters’ desperation and Peter Sellers’ manic malevolence. Kubrick’s painstaking attention to decor – each space is on extension of the characters’ psyches, perched between domestic order and chaos – renders the American setting through British locations, sets and back projection: the artificiality registers as subtle fantasylond.