The Coronet Theatre’s latest guests, Kyoto’s Chiten Theatre, have a take on Dostoevsky’s The Gambler that arrives like a hand slamming down on a roulette table. Set in the feverish resort town of Roulettenburg, The Gambler follows Alexei, the tutor to a rich family that includes the General, who is in love with the social-climbing Mademoiselle Blanche, and his stepdaughter, the cold Polina with whom Alexei is in love. Other characters include the perfidious Marquis de Grieux, the stolid Mr. Astley, and the Grandma whose fortune is sought after and death is much anticipated. It is a novella borne of desperation and an intimate knowledge of addiction, where calculation ends and self-destruction begins.
Director Motoi Miura and his company do not so much stage Dostoevsky as put him under a microscope, dissect his syntax, and reassemble the carcass into a pulsing, percussive organism by turning various lines into evocative soundbites. Chiten’s working method of collage and fragmentation is perfectly suited to this novella, which itself reads like a fever dream of compulsive thinking. A viewer who has not actually read the novel will find little coherence in terms of chronological plot. But the bones of the story are there, in a pastiche of impressions.
Itaru Sugiyama’s set is striking. For the entire 90 minutes, the ensemble plays musical chairs around a roulette table, betting and exclaiming and lamenting, which spins continually around Coronet’s stage. The table does not move on its own. It’s wheeled and drugged into motion by Alexei’s dragging feet, a slow, mechanical acceleration that in several instances culminates in him pushing the table and the rest of the ensemble with all his strength till he has to stop in a collapsed heap on one of the chairs attached to the table. Takahide Akimoto performs superbly as a tortured and maniacal Alexei, pulling off the physical metaphor of the book’s ruminations on class struggle with oft-humorous fervour.
The 90-minute production is timed with the precision of a metronome: every guttural moan, convulsive yell, and bang of the roulette ball is a beat in a dense, disquieting score. The ensemble periodically springs from their places and displays vigorous dance movements, as if to shake off the jitters which drive and captivate them. Every so often, a member or the entire ensemble looks to the audience and punctuates the dialogue with declarations, like “It is me, Alexei, Russian”, “that is fine”, and of course, placing their bets with a cry of “Red. Black. Zero. Check.”, making the flow of the show both formulaic and unpredictable.
The experimental rock trio kukangendai supply live soundscapes throughout the whole production that start off as celebratory but soon becomes claustrophobic. The viewer would expect this to be a preamble to a “main part” that never comes. The noise is it. If Dostoevsky wrote about the gambler’s compulsion, Chiten stages it, so the whole thing becomes repetitive, expectant, and finally exhausting. The audience, too, must endure the physical ordeal to be let in on the secret. As Alexei says to Polina, “Man is a despot by nature and loves being a torturer. You love it terribly.”
The cast members are effervescent in their roles, maintaining comedic timing and letting their anguish be deeply felt despite the highly stylised aspects of the performance. Characters’ private struggles, though intuited in bits and pieces through signature phrases, are on the whole flattened and are treated as just another entry in a ledger, in a game. The most realised character alongside Alexei is the Grandmother (Satoko Abe), not least of all because she plays dead by lying with her head hanging upside down for a good portion of the production and then at her peak quite literally showers the cast with gold. The company is blunt about this: money rules. The characters rarely interact with each other in an organic manner, instead treating the audience as their confessor. Chiten seems content to shout and let meaning accrue through repetition and volume; this will be enough to resonate deeply with some spectators, for others this will be deliberate obfuscation.
Finally, as a point of interest, the actors pronounce European names with a marked relish, scrutiny, an almost anthropological fascination. Japanese performers portraying Europeans who scrutinise one another creates a doubling that highlights how social performance is itself a kind of foreign language. Whether this is intentional or simply emergent from Chiten’s linguistic practice, the social satire aspect is sharpened.
The Gambler at the Coronet is not for those seeking a tidy retelling. It is abrasive in its insistence that everything is a bet. But the pace, the rawness of sounds, the inventiveness of movement, all contribute to theatre that is alert to Dostoevsky’s central paradox: that desire promises transcendence and usually delivers stuff and arithmetic. Give it a chance.
★ ★ ★ ★
Original text: Fyodor Dostoevsky
Direction: Motoi Miura
Music: kukangendai
Cast: Takahide Akimoto, Midori Aioi, Yohei Kobayashi, Satoko Abe, Dai Ishida, Masaya Kishimoto, Shie Kubota
Set design: Itaru Sugiyama
Costume design: Colette Huchard
Press photo: Shotaro Ichihashi
Running time: 90 min, no interval
Until: 15th February 2026