The Gambler

Synopsis

Based on the Dostoevsky novel of the same name The Gambler tells the story of addiction and social dysfunction in a mythical German casino spa called Roulettenburg. The main protagonist Alexei, a tutor of the General's family, becomes besotted with his daughter Polina and gets into trouble by obeying her every capricious whim. He is drawn into a spiralling world of desire and debt which leads to his downfall, ending the opera a gambling addict and losing Polina.

Our Review:

Simon Thomas - 12 February 2010

Get Fyodor Dostoevsky, not renowned for his insouciance, to write a piece of Gogolesque whimsy and have Sergei Prokofiev, without a staggeringly successful record of operatic output, to compose a score that is second rate by his standards and you have The Gambler, now receiving its Royal Opera premiere.

Richard Jones would seem to be the perfect director for the work and he does his best with it. He worked wonders with Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk at Covent Garden but there the material was much more giving. Here, take his characteristic brightness, cartoon characters, ingenious foreshortened sets and throw in a performing seal (literally) and things still don’t spark off.

We know that Prokofiev was capable of descriptive music but here so much of the time what’s coming from the pit bears little relation to the action, such as it is. The first half plods horribly. Things pick up a bit in the second, culminating in the busyness of the ...

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Latest User Review

Nicholas Lawson - 15 February 2010:

The review as written, is hopelessly conservative. While The Gambler may be the most inaccessible piece of music not written in a 12-tone form, it's an egregious error to accuse Prokofiev, on the one-hand, of conservative neo-Romanticism, and, on the other, to eschew his works from the modernist period. When will we ever get a critical culture that can get past some of the Cold war-era xenophobia on this greatest of 20th century composers?...

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