Pawn show that keeps the thrills firmly in check

There’s just not enough chess on the table in at the Hampstead Theatre in London, says

It’s striking how seldom we’re presented with portraits of genius on stage; in most spheres of life, we tend to marvel at high and overachievers, and wonder what makes them tick. The big problem is that it can be fiendishly difficult to show brilliance in action, and trace the filaments of that brilliance, when the activity is cerebral. And this is painfully reaffirmed watching Tom Morton-Smith’s under-satisfying account of the 1972 chess tournament between Boris Spassky and Bobby Fischer, the former (USSR) the reigning world champion, the latter (USA) the headstrong contender.

In Amadeus, Peter Shaffer gave us both an introduction to Mozart’s unfettered personality and a transcendent reminder of his music. In Red, John Logan’s play about Mark Rothko, dialogue gave way to real-time canvas-daubing. But with a chess match (Spassky and Fischer played 21 games), how do you relay the kind of calculations whirring away inside those intricately wired brains, and what moves do you choose to show the (likely untutored) audience?

Technically, Morton-Smith – who had a deserved hit in 2015 at the RSC with Oppenheimer, about the race for the atom bomb – has alighted on a scenario that can play human interest off against nerdy specifics. The chess confrontation was bound up with the stand-off between the Cold War superpowers. Held in Reykjavik, it was billed as “the match of the century”. The players were pawns in a geopolitical game.

Fischer was a McEnroe-esque figure, a drama queen whose exacting stipulations at times resembled covert machinations and whose behaviour bounced from the coolly restrained to the thuggishly feral. By contrast, Spassky – today, at 82, the oldest living former world champion – was the model of phlegmatic containment.

Yet while this quasi-docudrama gives us the basics of this meeting of minds, the personal toll taken, the parallel paranoia and suspicion, overall it seems afraid we’ll be bored by the board game. Fascinating surface incidentals are here but the core essentials are missing. What was it about chess that so animated Fischer to the point of anti-social obsession? There are moments when the script taps something: in a stirring showdown with his mother, he talks of being able to play “both halves of the game at once and keep them separate… so that my black-self doesn’t know what my white-self is planning”. We need more of that.

In Annabelle Comyn’s monumentally designed production, arrayed with vast wooden panels, the fine detail of chess-game manoeuvres is reductively expressed in a blur of expressionist movement – pieces held aloft in slow-motion, chairs spun in a wheeling orbit. It feels dumbed-down.

Robert Emms gives us, all the same, a captivating portrait of Fischer as a gaunt prima donna, a febrile introvert with flashes of brute. Initially seen in the shadows, coaxed on the phone by Henry Kissinger, he offers a spectacle of neurosis as he threatens to withdraw, fusses about every aspect of the set-up, even spits in the face of a match arbiter. The point is well made that while he’s held as a mascot for America he emblematises its individualism by refusing to play the patriot. Fischer is more roundly portrayed than his rival: in the closing stages we hear about the childhood experiences in the Siege of Leningrad that shaped Ronan Raftery’s studiedly placid Spassky, but in terms of giving depth it comes as too little too late.

Earlier, in a strange scene with an implied bearing on Fischer’s final success, we get an explanation for the use of the word “ravens” in the title. At the risk of restating the obvious, though, I was simply left ravenous for more chess.