thu 28/03/2024

The Gambler, Royal Opera House | reviews, news & interviews

The Gambler, Royal Opera House

The Gambler, Royal Opera House

The human zoo of Prokofiev's Dostoyevskian casino is viewed with sharp compassion

Fasten your seatbelts; it's a bumpy ride to the casino. In Prokofiev's wilful but uncompromising take on Dostoyevsky's tale of obsession, all the private paths of love, lust and greed lead to the gambling tables - eventually. The composer saves up one of the most adrenalin-charged scenes in 20th-century opera for the last act, giving director and conductor some headaches in generating interest and comprehensibility along the way. With a dedication we can only imagine, Richard Jones and Antonio Pappano have solved Prokofiev the chess master's conundrum better than in any previous production I've seen.

Every Jones comedy of recent years, from Falstaff and Gianni Schicchi to Hobson's Choice and Annie Get Your Gun, has ended by tying in and humanising its gags. In what is more of a tragicomedy, he asks his spectators for a visual attentiveness parallel to the literacy Prokofiev's musical dramaturgy originally demanded from an intended Russian audience he would have expected to know its Dostoyevsky. We can't take that for granted, so the baffling maelstrom of emotions between the excitable, clownish tutor Alexey and his employer's nervy, financially needy ward Paulina into which the opera plunges us needs context - and fast.

After witnessing Paulina's anxious pacing in front of the 1920s casino where Alexey is trying in vain to get her money, we find ourselves admiring the elephants in Roulettenburg's zoo. If you've seen Jones's ENO production of Berg's Lulu, you'll get the reference to the human menagerie; if you haven't, you quickly latch on to the fact that everyone treats everyone else as specimens to gawp at. Come feeding-time for the seal, Alexey makes his Germanophobic verbal assault on the pompous Würmerhelms; chucking a bucket of fish over the spectators gives an often anticlimactic curtain extra punch.

The vanishing perspectives and hints of roulette wheels in pedestals, sofas and lamps take us to a hotel lobby (pictured right, with Kurt Streit's Marquis sitting alongside Susan Bickley's Babulenka) and a top floor corridor with bedrooms leading off it, Loos-style, in lavish but telling designs from Antony McDonald complemented by Nicky Gillibrand's gaudy, Beckmannesque costumes and Mimi Jordan Sherin's chameleonic lighting. At the interval those of us who've taken time to come to love the piece were reassuring others that the best was yet to come after all the rather oblique one-to-ones between the desperate Russian entourage and their intriguing international hangers-on. Prokofiev knew it too, and adjusted much in his 1915 original 12 years later to try and help the action along, but he also knew that it rises in one steady dramatic crescendo towards its terrible double-denouement.

Dialogues move at such a pace that you forget the principals are singing and that melodies are actually popping up fitfully but increasingly. Pappano had decided that the fast-moving Russian speech-melody would best be sung in English - David Pountney's not always well-fitting translation - and that's a bit of a problem for the modified vowels of Angela Denoke's almost too angular red-headed gawk of a Paulina and Roberto Saccà's ringing Alexey (pictured below). Having been lucky enough to see covers and bit-part players Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts - an astounding Alexey at Grange Park - and Elisabeth Meister in action a couple of weeks ago, I can't help feeling they'd put across more sharply with the text the desperation of these two young people who, in other circumstances, might have been made for one another. In terms of straightforward gutsy singing, though, the A-cast duo offers much to admire.

While Prokofiev ends where he began, with the hopeless plight of the leading soprano and tenor, he distributes his character sketches fairly. John Tomlinson returns after many years to the role of the foolish General, infatuated by the cocotte Blanche (Jurgita Adamonyté) and driven to a madness witnessed, in this production, by all and sundry - musically a stunning scene where a few more stops might be pulled out. Tomlinson's natural stage presence and diction, though, are impeccable. The part of Babulenka, the capricious old woman who turns up from Moscow just when everyone has been expecting her death and who gambles away the expected fortunes, has the name of veteran Felicity Palmer written all over it; it was played here, however, by Susan Bickley, with more vocal opulence and youthful spirit than we might have expected. Not only is this Granny far from chairbound, as she is in Dostoyevsky; she even executes a tango with the tutor before going to meet her fate. Her disgrace is quietly moving, as it should be. Kurt Streit's slippery Marquis and Mark Stone's enigmatic, grinning Englishman Mr Astley complete a keenly detailed line-up.

The casino scene, complete with a red-eyed cat pacing on a screen to complement the performing seal of Act 1, is a marvel of orchestrated staging; it has to be, or the whole thing would implode. In the frenetic interlude following this tour de force, with only the run-down hotel dogsbody shambling against the tide of mass hysteria that envelops Alexey's lucky streak, the Royal Opera chorus executes a nifty routine with supreme panache. The contrast of this adrenalin rush with the drained, sordid scenes that surround it is one of the production's more understated achievements. Pappano keeps it all under control, without the manic drive of Gergiev but with no sob, skip, shriek or slink in the carefully calibrated mechanics of Prokofiev's infernal machine left unexamined. Singers and orchestra certainly got there, and their sense of relief at the end was palpable; but they'll be able to play with this elaborate toy even more as the run progresses.

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