Lolita on the stage? It certainly didn’t work when Edward Albee attempted it nearly 30 years ago, in a crassly explicit version.

And the two film adaptations of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel, by Stanley Kubrick and Adrian Lyne, are cramped — making the story either too comic or regrettably devoid of humour.

But Richard Nelson’s condensed telling vibrates with all that makes Nabokov a poetic, thrilling author. This substantial monologue, an hour and three-quarters without an interval, requires intense concentration — and rewards it.

We don’t see Lolita, the precocious 4ft10in nymphet, at all. Rather, we hear about her from her seducer-cum-protector, Humbert Humbert. Incarcerated and lonely, he reflects on his depraved past.

The material is shocking. Yet our compassion is magnetised, and Brian Cox brings a pained majesty to this exacting role.

Cox’s sooty voice acquires a rhotically defective European cadence — a bit the way Jonathan Ross might sound if he were a Viennese anaesthetist. But his nuanced interpretation means that, exhilaratingly, we slide in among the dense skeins of Nabokov’s playful, narcotic prose — a language of trapdoors and rhythmic oscillations. The theatrical quality of the writing pulsates before us almost visibly.

If there’s a problem, it is that Nelson’s staging is so unkinetic. At times we may wonder if this might not work just as well as an audiobook. Yet Cox’s one-man show is in truth the perfect approach to Lolita, which is after all a work of self-exculpation, a vain and brilliant individual’s apology for his grotesque existence.

We are reminded of Nabokov’s stylistic wizardry, and Cox’s first appearance at the National Theatre in almost two decades is a treat.

Performances 14 and 21 September. Information: 020 7452 3000.