Nabokov in Embryo

Vladimir Nabokov wrote a play called The Waltz Invention in 1938. More in the spirit of a dizzy gamble than of a calculated risk, the Hartford Stage Company has now given the drama its be lated professional world premiere. The play itself is deeply flawed, only fitfully flaring into zany, poignant and prophetic life. Though it will try some playgoers' patience and mystify others, admirers of Nabokov can scarcely fail to find it oddly fascinating.

It is a little like discovering the prehistoric ruins of a writer before he has built the edifices on which his reputation rests. One must bring to the play more than the play can possibly bring on its own: a knowledge of Nabokov's prevailing predilections. The most fundamental of these is that Nabokov has always regarded writing as an act of magic, of conjuring up rather than noting down, of producing totally unexpected rabbits from nonexistent hats.

He is also as playful as a small boy, a trait that sometimes results in childishly prankish writing, atrocious puns and sub-college humor. Yet along with the impishness runs a strand of poignance and melancholy, a nostalgia for the paradise lost of childhood, quite possibly inspired by Nabokov's enforced early exile from his native Russia.

Wish Fulfillment. In embryonic form, all of these Nabokovian traits and interests are present in The Waltz Invention. The hero, Salvator Waltz (Roland Hewgill), is a paranoiac who believes himself to be the possessor of a potentially earth-destroying machine that makes ordinary bombs look like firecrackers. Awaiting an interview with the Minister of War (Henry Thomas) of a kind of Balkan republic, he imagines how the interview will go and how his threats will be honored. The play therefore takes the form of megalomaniacal wish fulfillment, rather like Hadrian VII.

As a starter, Waltz blows the top off a mountain; then he goes on to sink an is land and dig a moon crater or two. In Act II, a sequence of absurdist hilarity, the nation's council of generals begins bidding at 2,000 crowns and goes to 1,000,000 in a vain effort to buy Waltz's infernal machine. During the negotiations, these senile clowns play with toy automobiles and sail paper airplanes at one another and into the audience.

Rarely has the military mind been caricatured with such zest and glee.

With his monstrous inventions, Nabokov seems to say, man has expelled himself from the Eden of Nature. Waltz rules the world but loses the girl who had captured his love when she told him who had lived on the mountain top he had blown up -- ";an old enchanter and a snow-white gazelle." At play's end, the humiliatingly real interview with the Minister of War takes place and Waltz is hauled off to the madhouse.

Since Nabokov lists Waltz as "a haggard inventor; a fellow author," the play is as much or more a parable of the writer as it is a prescient glimpse at the potential holocausts of atomic power. The writer too destroys old worlds and conquers new ones without necessarily easing his heart's anguish or desire. It is no discredit to the Hartford Stage Company that a playwright who had not learned his craft should test the players beyond their abilities. Roland Hewgill's Salvator Waltz is a shade too much the plausible confidence man to appear demoniacally unhinged, and Henry Thomas' Minister of War is a doddering Polonius with insufficient guile. All the characters most nearly resemble playing cards, and Director Paul Weidner riffles them with the dexterity of a card shark.

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