Prokofiev's "Gambler" - better read the book first

LONDON Feb 8 (Reuters Life!) - Sergei Prokofiev's "The Gambler", based on a Dostoevsky novel about obsessive greed, gets its first outing at the Royal Opera House this week, and, unusually for the company, will be sung in English.

The production is one of only a handful staged by a British opera company, reflecting the story's complicated structure and speedy singing and dialogue, said Richard Jones, who will direct it at Covent Garden.

"The Dostoevsky novella is fantastic and the Prokofiev setting is immensely literate and fervid and sweaty and exciting and possibly the closest thing there is in opera to a play," Jones told Reuters during a break from rehearsals.

"The singers have to go through quite a rigorous investigation of the back stories of characters."

He said that Russian stagings had the advantage of many people in the audience already knowing the story well.

"I think it requires a standard of literacy from the audience," he said. "It's written by a composer who loves that book and who is writing for an audience that has the same literacy about the same book.

"A little homework (by a British audience) would be helpful," he added, while conceding that few were likely to take the time to read the book before seeing the opera.

SINGING IN ENGLISH

In a bid to simplify the story, The Gambler will be sung in English, which is unusual for the Royal Opera House, unlike its rival the English National Opera which performs in English.

And reflecting its rarity on the British stage, the Royal Opera House is capping its ticket prices at 50 pounds ($80), a fraction of the normal cost. The Gambler opens on Thursday and ends on Feb. 27.

The production reunites Jones and the Royal Opera's music director Antonio Pappano following their critically acclaimed "Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk".

The Gambler is set in a mythical German casino spa called Roulettenburg.

The main protagonist Alexei, a tutor, is besotted with his employer's daughter Polina and is drawn into a spiralling world of desire and debt which leads to an addiction to gambling and personal loss.

It was a story Dostoevsky understood well -- he wrote the novel in 1866, in the middle of a long gambling obsession that brought him to the brink of ruin.

Prokofiev wrote the opera between 1915 and 1916 and completed the orchestration in January 1917, but the Russian revolution meant it was not performed for many years.

After extensive re-writing in 1927, its premiere was eventually held in 1929 at the Theatre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels.

(Editing by Steve Addison)