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Roulette russe: Prokofiev’s Game of Life and Death Wexford
National Opera House
10/18/2026 - & October 22*, 24, 30, 2026
Sergei Prokofiev: The Gambler, Op. 24
Igor Onishchenko*/Taras Prysiazhniuk (Alexei), Sophie Gordeladze (Polina), Alexei Botnarciuc (The General), Hilary Ginther (Blanche), Gavan Ring (The Marquis), Rory Musgrave (Mr Astley), Clarry Bartha (Grandma Babulenka), Seán Tester (Prince Nilsky), Ross Cumming (Potapytch), Wonsick Oh (The Baron), Olga Conway (The Baroness)
Wexford Festival Opera Orchestra, Valentin Uryupin (conductor)
Ivan Popovsky (stage director), Maria Tregubova (sets and costumes), Luisa Baldinetti (choreography), Paolo Bonapace (lighting)
I. Onishchenko (© Padraig Grant)
There are operas whose reputations owe less to any deficiency in their musical or dramatic substance than to the formidable demands they make upon their audiences. Sergei Prokofiev’s The Gambler (Igrok), based on Dostoyevsky’s novel of 1866, is one such work. Begun in 1915‑16 and completed in its original version in 1917, it had to wait until 1929 for its première in Brussels, the upheavals of the Russian Revolution having interrupted its initial progress towards the stage. Wexford Festival Opera’s decision to present it in Russian, in a compelling new production by Ivan Popovsky, was therefore an act of considerable artistic conviction. Described by the festival as its “opera for the head”, it is indeed a work that rewards intellectual engagement; yet its psychological penetration and visceral musical energy ultimately engage the emotions no less forcefully.
Prokofiev’s modernism should not be mistaken for emotional austerity. Angular rhythms, brittle orchestral colours, abrupt changes of mood and the deliberate absence of conventional lyrical release are the very means by which he exposes the feverish underside of ostensibly respectable society. His characters inhabit a world in which money determines social standing, affection is compromised by financial calculation, and the prospect of sudden enrichment becomes indistinguishable from the threat of ruin. The composer’s own libretto, closely following Dostoyevsky while dispensing with much of the novel’s first‑person introspection, concentrates the action into an extraordinarily taut study of people whose apparent freedom conceals their enslavement to desire.
A society of gamblers
The brilliance of The Gambler lies in the breadth of its central metaphor. Alexei, the General’s impoverished tutor, is plainly addicted to roulette; but he is hardly the only character staking his future on an uncertain outcome. The General gambles on an anticipated inheritance to secure his marriage to Blanche, a worldly demimondaine. The Marquis des Grieux manipulates the household through its debts, while Blanche calculates the advantages of wealth and social elevation. Polina, the General’s ward, struggles to preserve her independence within a system that makes money an instrument of emotional domination. Even the grandmother, whose unexpected arrival upends the family’s calculations, ultimately succumbs to the intoxicating promise of the gaming tables.
The entire society is a casino before the characters enter one. Its members differ in their methods, but all hope that an uncertain future will redeem an unsatisfactory present.
Alexei’s predicament is especially revealing. His contempt for aristocratic pretensions is not without justification: he recognises the hypocrisy of those who expect deference while conducting their affairs through greed and manipulation. Yet he remains profoundly attached to the values he ostensibly rejects. Roulette promises to reverse his social inferiority, transforming the despised dependent into a man whose wealth commands respect. He seeks liberation through the very currency that sustains his oppression.
His final triumph at the tables is consequently anything but a conventional victory. Having won spectacularly, he discovers that money cannot purchase Polina’s affection or restore the emotional equilibrium he has lost. His winnings merely intensify his obsession. The man who believed himself capable of mastering chance has become its prisoner.
A theatrical vision of mounting delirium
Popovsky, whose theatrical career is rooted in Moscow’s Pyotr Fomenko Workshop Theater, proves an especially felicitous choice for this Russian work. His understanding of the peculiar mixture of grotesquerie, psychological acuity and black humour in Dostoyevsky and Prokofiev prevents the production from becoming a merely frenetic illustration of gambling addiction. The comedy is sharp, sometimes deliciously absurd, but the tragedy beneath it is never obscured.
Maria Tregubova’s set design establishes a deliberately artificial world of stark structures and restricted colours. The hotel and casino are identified with almost disarming simplicity, while the predominantly monochromatic visual scheme evokes a society drained of vitality despite its incessant social manoeuvring. The period costumes provide a more decorative counterpoint, their elegance suggesting the veneer of respectability beneath which the characters’ appetites flourish.
The introduction of red in the later acts marks a decisive transformation. What initially appears a controlled, if emotionally sterile, environment becomes a world of mounting agitation. The visual transition is not merely decorative: it prepares the eye for the eruption of the casino scenes, where the production’s theatrical imagination reaches its fullest expression.
Among Popovsky’s most ingenious devices are the giant black roulette balls. As Babulenka’s losses accumulate, these outsized spheres of calamity invade the stage, transforming the instruments of gambling into an almost surreal physical threat. Chance, previously an abstraction, acquires a menacing material presence. The balls seem to roll through the characters’ lives with the inevitability of catastrophe, their scale making visible the disproportion between the apparent triviality of a game and the devastation it can inflict.
The revolving scenic structures reinforce this sense of instability. The environment itself seems caught in the same uncontrollable motion as the roulette wheel, while the characters struggle to maintain the illusion that they remain masters of their destinies. The device is particularly apt for Alexei: his apparent ability to seize control through gambling becomes another stage in his progressive loss of self‑command.
The casino sequence is the production’s dramatic summit. Luisa Baldinetti’s superb choreography turns the dancers, dressed in red and black to correspond to the colours of roulette, into embodiments of collective compulsion. Their circular, increasingly feverish movements do more than reproduce the mechanics of the game. They suggest a society transformed into a single organism, driven by an appetite it can neither understand nor satisfy. Paolo Bonapace’s lighting, with its expressive contrasts of illumination and shadow, adds an almost expressionistic dimension to this increasingly nightmarish world.
The result is a rare instance in which spectacle genuinely deepens psychological understanding. The casino does not overwhelm the drama; it makes the characters’ inner disintegration visible. The turning wheel becomes almost a character in its own right, while dancers, scenery and orchestral momentum converge in an image of collective surrender to the illusion that chance might deliver salvation.
The opening half requires more patience. Prokofiev’s conversational vocal writing and the characters’ intricate financial and emotional manoeuvres may initially leave spectators unfamiliar with the score or the novel at some distance from the action. Yet the measured accumulation of tensions is essential to the impact of what follows. Once the casino erupts, the production gathers an extraordinary momentum, and the preceding scenes acquire a retrospective coherence: the frenzy has been present all along, concealed beneath the social conventions.
An orchestra in the grip of the score
Valentin Uryupin and the Wexford Festival Opera Orchestra meet the formidable demands of Prokofiev’s score with impressive command. The conductor’s achievement lies not simply in sustaining its nervous energy but in making its intricate orchestral fabric intelligible. The music must retain its volatility without disintegrating into a succession of disconnected gestures; its biting irony must coexist with the capacity to expose genuine distress.
Prokofiev deliberately eschews the traditional architecture of arias and duets. His characters often seem to speak at an accelerated, emotionally charged pace, their verbal exchanges resembling skirmishes rather than opportunities for lyrical self‑revelation. The orchestra supplies much of the psychological commentary, registering impulses the characters cannot or will not articulate. Uryupin gives this restless writing shape and direction, allowing the dramatic pressure to accumulate without sacrificing clarity.
The performance also benefits from the conductor’s close relationship with the stage action. The casino scene, in particular, achieves its full force because musical and theatrical rhythms seem to spring from a common impulse. The orchestra is not merely accompanying the spectacle: it is the engine driving its collective delirium.
A protagonist consumed by his own wager
Ukrainian baritone Igor Onishchenko is the evening’s outstanding performer. Alexei is one of those rare operatic protagonists whose role demands that the singer expose himself to the full extremity of a character’s psychological disintegration. Onishchenko combines vocal agility and mellifluousness with an increasingly disturbing intensity, tracing the passage from romantic yearning and wounded pride to an obsession that consumes every other consideration.
His achievement is to make Alexei’s transformation feel inevitable rather than abrupt. The seeds of his destruction are already present in the young man’s insolence, his impatience with social subordination and his determination to prove his worth through spectacular gestures. At the roulette table, these traits acquire an irresistible but fatal focus. Onishchenko conveys both the exhilaration of apparent mastery and the terrible emptiness that follows it.
Georgian soprano Sophie Gordeladze offers a persuasive Polina, resisting the temptation to reduce the character to the passive object of Alexei’s devotion. Proud, vulnerable and emotionally guarded, she is caught between a desire for independence and the humiliating circumstances that make her dependent upon others. Gordeladze gives her considerable psychological complexity. The relationship’s tragedy lies partly in the way the characters’ emotions feed upon one another: the more desperately Alexei seeks proof of love, the more Polina retreats behind resistance and ambiguity.
Clarry Bartha’s Babulenka is another considerable success. The Swedish soprano brings impressive Russian diction and a commanding understanding of the character. Rather than presenting her as a grotesque old woman whose principal function is to squander an inheritance, Bartha makes her a genuinely imposing noblewoman, direct and unpretentious, with a vitality that exposes the surrounding aristocracy’s spiritual impoverishment. Her independence is real, even if it cannot protect her from the destructive attraction of the roulette wheel.
Moldovan bass Alexei Botnarciuc captures the General’s comic-tragic contradictions: pompous yet insecure, socially ambitious yet financially vulnerable, accustomed to exercising authority but easily reduced to helplessness. His powerful voice and vivid acting make the character’s oscillation between military bluster and personal humiliation particularly telling.
Hilary Ginther gives Blanche the appropriate mixture of allure and mercenary calculation, while Irish tenor Gavan Ring is an impressive Marquis des Grieux, his polished presence concealing the manipulative instincts that govern the character. The name itself carries an intriguing literary resonance, recalling the male protagonist of Prévost’s Manon Lescaut. Ross Cumming makes a memorable contribution as Potapytch, Babulenka’s valet; his expressive reactions, particularly after his mistress’s downfall, convey more than many a longer passage of singing.
The illusion of freedom
What makes this Wexford Gambler so compelling is the way its musical, theatrical and psychological dimensions reinforce one another. Prokofiev’s satire is not simply directed at gambling, nor does the opera offer a reassuring moral distinction between vice and virtue. Its characters are trapped in a social order that has made wealth the principal measure of human worth, yet their attempts to escape that order repeatedly reproduce its values.
Babulenka initially stands apart because she acts rather than manoeuvres. She refuses to play the role assigned to her by relatives awaiting her death, arriving instead to spend her own money as she pleases. Her vitality and independence make her a genuine force of disruption. Yet the roulette wheel ultimately exposes the limits of that freedom: even a personality so forceful cannot remain immune to the promise of a fortune multiplied.
Alexei’s tragedy is more profound still. He sees through the hypocrisy of his superiors but cannot escape the desire for their recognition. He gambles not merely money but dignity, love, self-command and the possibility of becoming someone else. His winnings appear to vindicate his revolt, only to reveal that he has exchanged one form of dependence for another.
Popovsky’s production brings this paradox to the stage with exceptional clarity. Its visual ingenuity, its mordant humour and its mounting physical intensity never obscure the human cost of the characters’ delusions. The final image of Alexei alone, still possessed by the voices and memories of the casino, is the logical culmination of a world in which the promise of liberation has become the most insidious form of enslavement.
A powerful and penetrating achievement, this Gambler demonstrates how an opera often regarded as forbidding can become riveting theatre when its intellectual rigour is matched by musical conviction and imaginative staging.
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