Johan Simons - ZT Hollandia

'The Gambler' is a co-production with the Berlin Volksbühne, with a cast of three Dutch-speaking actors and three German actors. In his story 'The Gambler', Fyodor Dostoevsky describes various cases of gambling addiction. Yet all of them are inspired by the same motive: love. One squanders everything he owns in an attempt to keep his lover, the other loses his lover because he thinks riches will win her, and the third gambles all her money away to deprive her loveless son of his inheritance. In this production, directed by Johan Simons, the gamblers are paired off with three contemporary characters: a head of government, the president of a multinational, and a pop star. Their driving force is not love, but power, wealth, and fame. Riding on a wave of success, they imagine themselves above and outside the law, and that is how they gamble away their fame, their company, or their country. The real gamblers in our society.