Chess Prince Edward

Taken from The Times May 1986 by Irving Wardle

political game: so that - for the defecting Anatoly - winning the championship means that he loses his family and his Western girlfriend loses her father.      The conditions of this game are set up from the start, with Anatoly facing a brattish, fiercely anti-Communist opponent; on either side are the apparatchiks of Russia and America, and, separating them, a referee who fits into the scheme as a priest of chess.     Despite Jacobean theatrical interest in the game, chess seems the unlikeliest subject for a blockbusting spectacle of this order; and its way of achieving that effect is partly through straightforward decoration. Every change of location, from the Hindu prelude to the Thai finale, brings out a lavish tourist display.     In the last of these, Trevor Nunn throws in a complete guided tour of Bangkok, including massage parlours, boxing, queues of delectable courtesans and more than Anthony Mingella showed of the city in a whole night out at the Aldwych.     But this rarely puts any strain on the narrative which, when its moment comes, invariably emerges in perfect focus. Much of the show, indeed, is extremely modest. Benny Andersson's and Bjorn Ulvaeus's score supports most of the vocal line with unemphatic ostinatos and vamps; and its home style might be called Moog baroque. Its main success is in achieving expressive

melody that exactly follows the contours of Rice's lyrics.     Those, as always, are practically co-extensive with the book. They occasionally hit the spoken word only to rebound instantly into rhyme, but the line-lengths get their own melody from syncopation based on the singers' thought-processes, sometimes streching out like elastic, sometimes contracting hard like a clenched fist.     The one narrative miscalculation lies in the treatment of the two rivals, Anatoly (Tommy Korberg) has a searing top register and is most plausibly cast as a thoughful Russian with his heart in the right place. But he does not compare in dramatic interest with the ghastly Trumper (Murray Head), first seen insulting the folk-dancing welcome committee and going on to flatten a member of the press corps.     Head plays him with obnoxious star quality, and goes on to give an account of himself in one of the best numbers of the night "Pity The Child", but thereafter fades out, leaving his opposite number to a crisis of conscience that arrouses more interest in the dirty tricks department (zestfully lead by John Turner) than the hero.     Elaine Paige, as a torch-carrying second who switches sides to the defector, contributes a vocally blazing performance, though emotionally in counts for more in her divided duet with the abandoned Soviet wife than with her menfolk.

Endless hype, rubbernecking crowds and cheers to raise the roof - nothwithstanding all this. Chess turns out to be a fine piece of work that shows the dinosaur mega-musical evolving into an intelligent form of life.     The usual tactic in this form of entertainment is to draw on every orchestral and technical device the modern theatre has to offer so as to brainwash the audience into the illusion that they are witnessing a great event. As this piece approaches its climax with thunderous reprises of Sweden's answer to "Land Of Hope And Glory" something of this old habit persists: but, for most of the way, the show deploys its armoury of resources to put over a strongly imagined fable with wit, panache, passion and a strong moral centre.     Suggested by the Fischer/Spassky tournament, Chess follows the careers of two world champions - one Russian, one American - from an opening match in Italy to a showdown in Bangkok. Initially, with a Hindu temple number celebrating the origins of the game followed by the arrival of the principals on Robert Wagner's checker-board stage, you expect a plot cunningly geared to the moves of the pieces. It is a false clue.     The real aim of Tim Rice's book is to present the players as pawns in the surrounding