Chess Review

Braintree and Witham Times  – Ron Fosker

Love and chess, a dramatic mixture
On the face of it, chess is up there with fishing and dominoes as a likely subject for a dramatic musical. The num­ber of people on the streets of Witham who could name the current world champion would probably fit into a tele­phone box.
But it was not always that way. In the early 1970s, chess made the front pages. And if you bad asked anyone in the street then to name a chess player, they would almost cer­tainly have come up with Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky.
It was the match between the two, and particularly the eccentric behaviour of the American challenger, that fired the public’s imagination and gave Tim Rice the idea for this musical.
His lyrics were brought to life by the sparkling choreog­raphy of Nikki Mundell­-Poole. The evening opened and closed with the stage bathed in the black and white of the chessboard but, in between, the Tyrolean and Bangkok settings allowed for a wide spread of colours in the ensemble numbers.
A newcomer, a regular and a returner took the three main roles of the two chess players and the manager of one, who falls in love with the other. John Escott, David Slater and Jenni Leggett brought drama and pathos to the roles and coped superbly with Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus’s exceedingly challenging musica1 score. Kathryn and Stewart Adkins brought their usual polished performances to the ro1es of Slater’s wife and his KGB handler, while Tim Sheppard, in his 53rd year with WAOS, and Tom Whelan stepped out of the shadows with aplomb as the American marketing guru and the arbiter.
At the other end of the age scale, the show offered oppor­tunities to a number of the society’s younger members.
Ingenious use was also made of three giant screens, a first for the company, which show some of the action and background.
However, the complicated story, not helped by the fact that much of it is told by the chorus, and the dearth of well-known numbers led to more empty seats than is usual at a WAOS production. That was a shame as this was a high-standard evening that deserved better support