FringeReview UK 2026
The Gambler
Osamu Dazai/Chiten Theatre
Genre: Adaptation, Biographical Drama, classical, Costume, Drama, International, Live Music, New Writing, Short Plays, Theatre, Translation
Venue: The Coronet Theatre
Festival: FringeReview UK
Low Down
Those who saw Chiten Theatre’s Goodbye in March 2024 have clearly remembered, since The Gambler is already nearly sold out. Again a novel – this time by Dostoevsky – is the spine of an adaptation by Chiten Theatre, whose speciality is dramatising fragments of existing texts, often classic western plays. Directed by founder Motoi Miura, its seven-strong ensemble with the three-strong Kukangendai band return to the Coronet till February 15.
Chiten Theatre intensifies to a point of light here something barbarous, atavistic, and goes to the heart of nihilism. Still outstanding.
Review
“A Russian with money goes to Paris. He doesn’t come back with any.” Those who saw Chiten Theatre’s Goodbye in March 2024 have clearly remembered, since The Gambler is already nearly sold out. Again a novel – this time by Dostoevsky – is the spine of an adaptation by Chiten Theatre, whose speciality is dramatising fragments of existing texts, often classic western plays. Directed by founder Motoi Miura, its seven-strong ensemble with the three-strong Kukangendai band return to the Coronet till February 15. Japanese theatre has a thing for Dostoevsky. The Brothers Karamazov was brought to Sadler’s Wells by Hideki Noda less than eight months after Goodbye.
This time it’s a more familiar classic novel The Gambler. In 1866 Dostoevsky was given an ultimatum to clear his gambling debts: produce a novel in 30 days. He did so in the same feverish fit he’d spent at the tables, snatching sleep and returning to a different table and a different obsession. What he portrayed was one protagonist meeting cross-sections of similarly-addicted people from all Europe – a general, his stepdaughter Polina Alexandrovna, a Mr Astley from London, a grandmother: with the same crazed eyes as a bunch of people in an opium den. Most of all the desire to lose: chance, self-loathing, class, ambition, desire, appetite. It’s refracted through Chiten’s distinctive theatrical language – “fragmented, musical, and raw” we’re told. Five of the seven cast of Goodbye are returning too. The cast now comprises Takahide Akimoto, Midori Aioi, Satoko Abe, Dai Ishida, Masaya Kishimoto, Shie Kubota, Yohei Kobayashi.
Raw? Perhaps. For instance actors smash down large ‘chips’ in sequence, recalling the synchronised crashing-down of beer glasses in Goodbye. It’s a staple feature of actors contributing to the sonic crash punctuating the 85-minute piece. Yet it’s more a sophisticated ensemble of ritual, jump-cuts and – here – a mad carousel unravelling as the table is literally turned by one actor on Itaru Sugiyama’s roulette stage. Above looms Yasuhiro Fujiwara’s light-show dressed as a chandelier: white blue, red points dance up and down in hideous gaiety. Each black-clad actor speaks, in Colette Huchard’s subtly-various costume design, one with a general’s red piping. Here too they gesture. The grandmother leaps up and collapses backwards, or forwards on the table and stays prone for minutes. There’s some individuation here: actors occasionally emerge downstage, breaking from the table. It’s less the solid bar ritual of Goodbye, yet still a collective identity. We might note Alexei is at the head of the table, and suggest it’s he who’s protagonist. But it won’t do. This is a collective madness, and all Europe is here. Particularly effective are the four surtitle screens: the words are the easiest to read I’ve ever encountered.
Musically there’s a difference – the experimental rock trio kukangendai pulses onstage as before: here spread in a triangular sonic landscape of guitar and percussion. But augmented of all things by Bunsho Nishikawa’s sound of Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro which they mimic: Mr Astley perhaps. And is there a trace of Takemitsu’s 1954 waltz from the film The Stolen Face? It would be fitting. Near the end one protagonist tells of what gambling like any addiction does. “You have no memories, no family.”
No novelist either. A roulette addict in particular, Dostoevsky bet the publishing rights of all his past and future works on that 30-day wager. Partly stimulated by the same desire for oblivion, his creative energy was too strong. Through the jump-cuts, it’s possible to trace the arc of some characters, and there’s several faux epilogues, catching the audience out as they clap prematurely. We can trace relationships, a grandmother dying leaving fortunes to a granddaughter, and general who’s gently cheated of his money by Polina but dies looked after by her. Or there’s the brief tainted fortunes of those who win. And for those who lose, a dole-out by the winner of a gulden to eat: with which they promptly feed the table again.
Yet there’s an explosive climax just previously as the winner picks up a groaningly heavy suitcase, heaves it onto the table. And produces the most spectacular – and prolonged – effect of the evening. It underscores the visceral relevance of addiction, of money, of compulsions laid on us by capitalism: which here asks if we’re all self-loathing because of it. Chiten won’t appeal to everyone, perhaps. The style’s consistent though, and you can adjust to its abandonment of the naturalist rise and fall of western dramaturgy. For those it does grip, it intensifies to a point of light here something barbarous, atavistic, and goes to the heart of nihilism. “Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs” as the lugubrious Philip Larkin put it. Turgenev’s Smoke, anyone? Still outstanding.
Written by Osamu Dazai Adapted by Chiten Theatre and Directed by Motoi Miura, Music Kukangendai, Set Design by Itaru Sugiyama, Lighting Design Yasuhiro Fujiwara, Sound Design Bunsho Nishikawa, Costume Designer Colette Huchard, Stage Manager Atsushi Ogi, Producer Yuna Tajima. Photo Credit Atsushi Ogi.
Supported by the Agency for Cultural Affairs, Government of Japan through the Japan Arts Council.
