Musical Cyberspace

One popular criticism of Chess seems to be the lack of focus in terms of characterisation. Who is the protagonist? Is there more than one? Is it Florence all the way through? Freddie in Act I and Florence in Act II? Why does Freddie shift modes from a possible protagonist to one that provides commentary, like the Arbiter? How does Anatoly fit into this grand scheme? And this doesn’t even begin to broach the severely underwritten Svetlana. It’s all very convoluted.

Chess isn’t a conventional narrative musical; there’s a huge concept being played out at the centre of it all, based on the idea that everything – love, war and so on – is like a game of chess. So I don’t think that, ideally, there should be one primary protagonist or antagonist. The idea isn’t conventional, so why should the expression simply fall in line with established conventions. After all, content dictates form….

Ultimately, I feel that the whole play should revolve equally around Freddie, Florence, Anatoly and Svetlana – at the start they are like two king and queen pairs. One problem here is that Svetlana is no where near as developed as she should be and enters into the action far too late – in some ways, I feel like the character hasn’t earned her verse and counterpoint in “I Know Him So Well” in the middle of the second act.

Another major flaw is Freddie’s change of mode from the first act to the second; “One Night in Bangkok” as an opening for Act II provides a perfect parallel for “Merano” in Act I, but isn’t what’s being sung more suited to the Arbiter, who has been the observer all along? More confusion follows when all of a sudden Freddie is doing interviews and singing a song about his childhood that doesn’t make dramatic sense for the direction his character has moved in the second act. And should the final match involve another player? Where was he on the metaphoric chess board of the show when the game was set up?

Over the years, there have been attempts to work out these problems, but the changes are cosmetic and don’t engage with the unanswered questions that are at the core of the piece.

Take for example, the addition of the song “He is a Man, He is a Child”. A new song for Svetlana, placed in Act 2 with no precedent in an English language version by Tim Rice. What intrinsic value does this add to the play? It’s too little, too late.

I think an important element in creating the right balance between the characters theatrically would be to establish each character with a musical theme (as is pretty much the case already), and then (because chess is all about variations of strategy) allow access to the other characters, thereby establishing a theme musically and variations through text. This I think would help to define the similarities as well as the differences between the characters.

So, while I can’t envision how giving Florence, for example, a verse of “Anthem” would work in practice, the idea that one could or should exist is appropriate. A link between Florence and Svetlana using “Someone Else’s Story” could also be a good idea, though I firmly believe Svetlana should get the song proper and Florence the reprise. The short snippet of Florence gets of “Pity the Child” in certain versions of the show works beautifully. It’s at moments like these when things begin to snap into focus and the game they are all playing with/against one another becomes so clear and entrenched in the characters themselves, rather than in the outline of the narrative in the programme.

Of course, it goes without saying that this would have be handled very carefully indeed and perhaps part of the point of using this concept might be about the possibility of characters sharing fragments of music that don’t necessarily “belong” to them to point out the schisms between them even while finding similarities. It shifts from a traditional idea of the role of the reprise in musical theatre to a mode of musical language that has the characters responding to the same impulses through what is either in their nature or life experience, challenging the audience to negotiate that subversion of musical language to create meaning from our position as the witnesses to this drama. I think so much of this game they’re playing is interesting because all four characters have many of the the same elements lurking in the respective psyches that have been created for them. Part of the reason they’re playing the games the way they do is because of which of these is dominant.

I guess this is one of the many dramaturgical challenge facing anyone who has the task of shaping Chess into something that works theatrically. My point, I suppose, is that if it’s done cosmetically – which is how I perceive many of the changes affected to the text over the years – the adaptation will never be definitive. But, in the long run, perhaps the game of working out what is going on in Chess is just as enjoyable as the material itself.

With the recent release of the Chess in Concert DVD, I find that I am once again thinking about this most problematic of musicals. The main problem with the show (in any of its variations) is that it has a great concept, but this never adequately distills itself into narrative and character, leaving a fair deal of the show as a play of ideas that really isn’t that easy to access. And while cognitive accessibility might be the problem in the first half, at least there’s a fairly good push at narrative there; the second half doesn’t hang together nearly as well, despite having some excellent material.

When the show succeeds in getting past the threshold of ideas into narrative and character, it’s fantastic; I think that’s why sequences like “Nobody’s Side”, “Where I Want To Be”, “Someone Else’s Story”, “One Night in Bangkok”, “I Know Him So Well” and “Pity the Child” have the potential to work so effectively in production, as they did when the musical played in a South African production directed by Paul Warwick Griffin in 2008. This production, which was adapted by the director himself, is far and away the best packaging of the material I’ve come across.

Getting back to the idea of Chess as a concept musical, what the show attempts to do is compare chess with love and the Cold War. Mathematically put, the relationship between the three elements could be described as follows:

• love = chess = cold war; or maybe
• chess! = love x cold war; or possibly
• love ~ chess ~ cold war; or (at a push)
• chess:love → cold war; or even
• chess:love ⇔ cold war.

Ultimately, I suppose any of these is reductive and that’s partly what the problem with the show is in terms of the score and especially it’s book are. The show is full of ideas that never reveal themselves through narrative strategies or storytelling as – it seems – the creators intend; the problem is that the creators (Tim Rice and the boys from ABBA) have committed to the idea but haven’t committed fully to the story they are telling or to the characters whose story they are telling in a manner that would illuminate the ideas that are at the heart of the show.

What ultimately needs to happen to make the piece work is that chess needs to become a central image of the piece without the idea of it’s relationship to love and/or politics being as obvious, much the same way as Fiddler on the Roof uses the Fiddler as a recurrent and extended image throughout the play. It should be a statement that is revelatory rather than one that is given. Fiddler on the Roof balances this brilliantly by establishing the image and then developing it throughout the book and score using a variety of situations, images and motifs.

The production mentioned above managed to achieve this quite effectively in its staging, but the text itself needed adaptation to achieve this. Until the definitive rewriting process required happens, this means that the material has to be very carefully (re)structured; it cannot merely be shuffled around in the way that generally seems to characterize new productions or concerts of the show. But rewriting seems unlikely, so I suppose we’ll always experience Chess as a flawed masterpiece, rather than a true one – which is a pity.