Vladamir Nabokov's Lolita is not a novel about child sexual abuse. It is a novel about novels, an extended, brilliant play on words. Its only character is the narrative voice, a voice that calls itself Humbert Humbert. The voice does not rape a 12-year-old child called Lolita, it spins a yarn about a paedophile through the pastiche of familiar styles and genres, spoofs of academic pedantry, Joycean word games, puns and self-referential jokes, writes Fintan O'Toole

Lolita Peacock Theatre, Dublin

If you take away this voice, you are left with something much worse than Hamlet without the Prince. Lolita becomes a version of reality that is morally obnoxious. It is, quite simply, a paedophile's charter. If Lolita is not a pawn in a game of verbal chess but a character meant to represent a real human being, then the story is a vicious lie. She is the lie that every child abuser wants to believe: that the victim is in fact the victimiser, the siren, the seductress.

What gives Nabokov's novel its strange power is that it is a performance on the edge of this moral abyss. This is also what makes Lolita arguably the most problematic of all literary texts for adaptation to the screen or the stage. The consequences of failure are a travesty not just of a great literary work, but of a vital moral truth.

When he made his film version of the novel in 1962, Stanley Kubrick seems to have understood this. He was unhappy with the screenplay written by Nabokov himself, and clearly felt that it did not succeed in finding cinematic equivalents for the parodies and pastiches of the novel.

He addressed this in two ways. One was to use Humbert's narrative in voice-over. The other was to invent his own games. At the start of the film, for example, there is the scene in which Humbert murders his rival Quilty. Humbert approaches Quilty and asks "Are you Quilty?" Quilty, who has a sheet wrapped around him like a toga, replies "No, I'm Spartacus. Have you come to free the slaves or somethin'?" Since Kubrick's own previous film was Spartacus, the parodic intent is obvious.

It is important to go into this detail because the new stage version of Lolita, presented by the imaginatively innovative Corn Exchange company at the Peacock, is an adaptation by Michael West, not of the novel, but of the Nabokov screenplay whose inadequacies so troubled Kubrick. It rushes in where Kubrick, with good reason, feared to tread.

Corn Exchange's style, developed over the past seven years by director Annie Ryan, clearly has parodic elements of its own.

It is based, roughly, in Commedia dell'Arte, a form which thrives on stock characters and knockabout comedy. The assumption behind this production seems to be that this style, brilliantly deployed, is enough in itself to keep the show out of the moral swamp.

The style is indeed deployed with all the precision, clarity and energy that audiences have come to expect. Kris Stone's abstract set is dominated by a receding white pyramid that serves as both highway and bed, thus intertwining with great economy the notions of travel and desire that are a large part of Nabokov's game. The live music from Vincent Doherty and David Boyd provides a dissonance that adds to the sense of distance.

The performances from Andrew Bennett, Ruth Negga, Clara Simpson and David Pearse are rigorously exact and, in the case of the hugely impressive Simpson, also wonderfully fluid. Here too, there is a sense of distance. The actors' faces are painted.

Their movements are stylised. The element of phantasmagoria is strong.

There are, though, two very serious sets of problems that derive from the decision to accept Nabokov's screenplay as the basis for the show. On the aesthetic level, West's interventions do not get rid of the sense that this is a third-hand experience, an adaptation of an adaptation. It is like reading a translation from French of a book that was written in German. The underlying rhythm and pace of the text are still those of the cinema, so that we never escape the feeling of watching a slowed-down movie.

Much more serious, though, is that the distancing effects of the theatrical style do not in fact replace Nabokov's narrative voice as a way of reminding us that this story is a lie. Stylised acting is still, within the world of the stage, real. The naked flesh of an actor playing a 12-year-old girl doesn't cease to be real just because the actor's face is painted.

Even the conventions of Commedia dell'Arte are a lie that is supposed to tell the truth. Here they are a lie that tells a lie: that Lolita is a seductive siren, that her rape by Humbert is an act of love. What all the distancing devices ultimately create is a distance from any sense of responsibility for this imagery. They become simply an aesthetic version of "no comment". Can it really be that in a country torn apart by child sexual abuse, that is all the National Theatre has to say?

Lolita runs until September 28th. Booking: 01-8787222. There will be a post-show discussion on September 10th and September 17th at 10 p.m. Admission free.