Review: Chiten Theatre’s The Gambler ~ question & answer
photo of ensemble by Dimitri Djuric
Japan’s Chiten Theatre has brought an adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s existentialist novella The Gambler to London, prompting philosophy’s favourite question – why?
Host venue, The Coronet, provides a well-fitting glove for this production as its long roulette table floats around the thrust stage under intimate swirls of Victorian décor. A band of two electric guitarists and a drummer flank the characters of fictional German Spa town ‘Roulettenberg’ on the corners of the stage, playing rhythmic lounge music with varying urgency and repetition. However, you would only know this from researching the original text.
Motoi Miura’s creative adaptation is stripped of most context and intentionally so, seeking to ‘liberate the text’ from the usual dramatic constructs to provoke new associations among the audience – it is, as suggested by the name of the company, all very mid-twentieth-century minimalist and didactic. In effect, we are offered a generalised aesthetic of main character Alexy Ivanovich’s addictive gambling world and that of the characters at the table who persecute him.
Enormous credit goes to the seven strong ensemble, who hold together 90 minutes of almost continuous rotation, textual exclamations, and climbing on and off surfaces with the energy and resilience of athletes. In this sense, it is a piece of durational live-art theatre to be marvelled. Because it is uncompromisingly a series of non-sequiturs in mini-monologue form, I’m going to be provoking and suggest that dinner-theatre might be a natural vessel to hold a piece that is episodic, non-linear and repetitive by nature, as well as social and seated in subject matter. Irrespective of this, the sheer commitment of performances like Satoko Abe’s Grandmother, Midori Aioi as Polina and Masaya Kishimoto as The General keep eyes glued on the stage.
If you seek the shape and emotional transformation of story, this isn’t the production for you, by admission. But the sequences that pop-out with sheer longing and frustration, notably between Alexey and Polina, offer brief immersion in the relatable.
As a design, The Gambler is wholly integrated – an orb of illuminated bars hangs chandelier and game-like above the heads of the players – the floor is similarly a circle of portions and numbers. The sur-titles are unusually effective in hovering at good angles from beneath and above to enable tracking action while reading.
The question remains – why a Russian novella on fate and gambling, from a Japanese company, in London, at this time? Louche gambler Dostoyevsky might be satisfied by Theatre’s favourite answer ‘Why not?’
TF
