Masterful score outweighs the flaws
Chess ENO, Coliseum
★★★★★
Chess is the archetypal Eighties musical – big-haired, brazen and bombastic. It takes place on a world stage as two grandmasters of the game, one Soviet and one American, battle it out against the backdrop of Cold War politics. Their personal lives become entwined as the manager of one becomes the other’s lover. Laurence Connor’s dazzling production convinced me that Chess boasts one of modern musical theatre’s greatest scores, but also that Richard Nelson’s book is an incohesive, psychologically flimsy muddle.
Certainly, Chess was criticised for its messy structure and shallow appraisal of global affairs when opened in the West End in 1986, but this recalibrated revival, which aims to bring out the sheer power of the music through a semi-staging, hasn’t managed to properly address the show’s many flaws.
That said, it is, for the most part, hugely enjoyable, with Connor throwing every visual trick onto the capacious Coliseum stage where the squares of a monochrome chess board are illuminated like the walls of a ritzy Eighties nightclub. Terry Scruby’s video screens project progress in the Space Race and animated sequences with a modish nod to the projection mappings.
The wellchoreographed ensemble switch from circus acrobats to effete London city boys to goosestepping Russian guards (in probably the campest sequence of musical theatre I’ve ever seen). It’s overblown, of course, but so exuberantly performed that you can’t fail to be swept up in the gleeful hyperbole.
Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus’s score (given a superb energy by the ENO orchestra who are wisely placed above the centre of the stage) is magnificent – illustrating how this pair of Swedes are capable of creating some of the saddest and yet also some of the most uplifting music in the world. There are traces of their late work for Abba (The Winner Takes It All, One of Us) in such melancholy numbers as Where I Want to Be and The Deal (No Deal), which combine rigorous musical structure and fiendishly difficult harmonies. The score is blessed by very strong vocal performances from the show’s four leads (Michael Ball, Alexandra Burke, Cassidy Janson and Tim Howar) and only the stoniest of hearts would fail to get goose bumps from Burke and Janson’s duet I Know Him So Well. Howar, in the role of the hubristic showman Freddie Trumper, is perhaps the weakest of the four, but brings an impressive chutzpah to One Night in Bangkok which improves greatly on Murray Head’s infuriatingly luvvieish original (bewilderingly, a top 10 hit back in the day).
Indeed the power of the vocals often manages to distract you from Chess’s terrible inadequacies. The plot leaps from set piece to set piece without ever reaching anything approaching psychological truth. This often hobbles the central performances as no one is ever able to fully grasp the motivations of their characters.
This is particularly the case with Ball, playing the Russian chess champion Anatoly Sergievsky, who is simply never developed to any sufficient degree and Ball must therefore channel all his energies into the music (most notably in Anthem, the show’s highlight). Similarly I was left with no indication of whether Burke, as Svetlana the wronged wife, has serious acting chops – so sketchily written was her character.
And yet, I am not sure any of this really matters. If you take Chess as a sequence of show-stoppers, it’s stunning: those memorable tunes linger for a long time after the whole heady spectacle has faded.
Until June 2. Tickets: 020 7845 9300; eno.org