Compulsive gambling, legacy hunting and unrequited love in Russian. In the end, only loss. And most of all: an opera that no-one below pensionable age in Vienna has ever seen live. Clearly, the Vienna State Opera could have made things easier for both itself and the audience than to stage Prokofiev’s The Gambler, based on Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel, as the first première of the new season. But you can’t buy courage, and the Viennese audience knows how to appreciate ambitious projects.
Unquestionably, Dostoyevsky is one of the great storytellers of all time, not least because he did not actually write The Gambler, his somewhat autobiographical novel, but rather, he dictated it. The novel paints a terrifying picture of the depths of the human soul, but also provides much comedy in a bizarre world, especially by the time Prokofiev, who wrote his own libretto, has cut out a third of the story: in the fictional gambling metropolis of Roulettenburg, a debt-laden General is waiting impatiently for the death of a rich aunt; the eagerly awaited inheritance will, amongst other things, enable him to marry a sexy Frenchwoman named Blanche. However, as the said aunt suddenly appears and loses her fortune at roulette, the result is perfect financial and amorous storm. Alexei, the central character in the story, is by no means unguilty: he has already lost his job as the General’s private tutor due to his slavish devotion to the General’s stepdaughter Polina, for whom his feelings are distinctly more than those appropriate to a servant.
It turns out that this enigmatic person, just like her stepfather, has debts to a French marquis, and other disasters happen to them. She does not want anything, not even from Alexei, who suddenly has a streak of luck at roulette. In the end, Alexei is alone and has lost his wits (in this staging, he grows animal claws, with which he murders Polina).
To show the animalistic side of an addict in this way departs from the original work (Alexei is not a murderer), but it’s an ending that makes plenty of sense in Karoline Gruber’s carefully thought out and visually interesting staging: after events have been happily spinning around in a circle, namely the shape of a run-down merry-go-round, symbolic both of the roulette wheel and of the vicious circle of gambling addiction, it puts an end to these childish desires for satisfaction.
Addiction shows its abhorrent, deadly grimace. When one thinks about how many lives are destroyed, how many families are destroyed because of addiction to betting and gaming, Gruber is not overstating the case. She has taken such care in the meticulously detailed direction of her characters that one never loses track of the numerous people on the stage. This is also helped by the device that the performers of the main roles are highlighted in colour, while the minor figures are pale and undistinguished. You can read from this that addicts are first and foremost concerned with themselves and their addiction, and only slightly do they consider their environment.