Chess: 1990 Sydney Production

This was the second version of Chess that I watched, after the 2008 Royal Albert Hall Chess in Concert.

This version is very different from the London/2008 Royal Albert Hall version, totally rearranged (but still with book and lyrics by Tim Rice). There’s only one chess tournament, set in Bangkok, between Freddie and Anatoly; Anatoly just applies for UK citizenship in the middle of it. The pacing definitely works out way better here – the first chess match starts very early (compare to the 2008 concert where it’s some 35 minutes in), with some of the other stuff like “The Merchandisers” interleaved with it instead of dragging out the lead-up with it. The Arbiter matters a bit more; Svetlana gets a bit more focus since she’s there with Anatoly from the start and expresses concern about Anatoly’s obsession with winning the match affecting their relationship; Florence gets some new lines that give her a bit more depth.

The romance between Florence and Anatoly doesn’t really make me care about it any more here – if anything it’s even clumsier, since they sort of start to dance early in “Mountain Duet” for what feels like no reason at all, and Anatoly seemingly defects the actual day after meeting her just that once, while his wife is literally there, which just feels like a bizarre dick move. But it also feels like this production doesn’t want us to care quite as much – I think it’s basically down to how it doesn’t have the whole “One More Opponent”/“You and I” scene, which tips the balance so that Florence and Anatoly’s relationship feels less like an emotional throughline we ought to be invested in and more like just one of the facts of the plot. So in some ways it works better, even though I’m still deeply uninvested.

The ending is considerably changed. “The Soviet Machine” features Molokov explaining to his cronies that they’re in a win-win situation (I like how well that works with the “Not one move that won’t improve our nation’s chances” lyric), where regardless of the outcome of the match the Soviet Union can consider it a victory now that Anatoly has defected, but the ideal outcome for them would be if Anatoly doesn’t show up for the match at all and comes crawling back to Moscow. So that’s the outcome that Molokov and Walter are pushing for, and Florence really does try to persuade Anatoly to ditch the match so that she can get her father back, which he then ultimately ignores.

“Endgame” itself then plays out very differently. In the London version of the story, Florence and Svetlana’s voices both argue fiercely that Anatoly ought to throw the match and berate him for not doing so while he argues back. This one has the chorus shaming him for not showing up initially, until he does appear; then, during the match, Florence and Svetlana sing one of their original verses – only for Anatoly to have a moment where he turns away from the board and sings:

Then I think of her
Her and her father
What would she prefer?
I know I’d rather
Never win again than feel that I’d betrayed them

All in all Anatoly’s inner conflict during the game is quite different – it’s all about deciding on the bit where he will go back to the Soviet Union afterwards, sacrificing his chance to actually make his defection reality, while he’s already going for winning the game as soon as he shows up, and during the game he thinks about how he doesn’t want to betray Florence instead of arguing with her view on it.

That’s not exactly a bad change – in a way it feels more straightforwardly coherent, compared to the London version where he spends the song digging in his heels about winning the game and concludes Florence and Svetlana just want to control him and never understood him, only to afterwards decide to give himself up for Florence’s father anyway (I ultimately kind of like that progression because it’s very like an agitated, distressed human under pressure, but it is somewhat abrupt). But I don’t find myself liking this version of the endgame as much, perhaps mainly just because I don’t find Anatoly very sympathetic in this version generally – we’ve cut out most of the bits with him being conflicted and distressed about the mind games being played with him, so he’s just kind of there, cheating on his wife, being immediately smitten with Florence for some reason, defecting and sending her flowers in the same breath, and then eventually making this decision. I cared about him in the 2008 Chess in Concert in a way I don’t really here, even if I didn’t care enough about the relationship.

And then, of course, Freddie here is entirely missing his arc. He’s just an antagonist and that’s all, “Pity the Child” is put as a petulant contemplation of how he’s always been a winner that doesn’t lead to anything or mean anything, no “Talking Chess” moment of any kind. As a result, this Freddie is not really very compelling at all to me, just kind of a boring misogynist asshole who is there and has a vague throwaway Freudian excuse but no real depth or development.

This version is more one for the women; Florence and Svetlana both get a somewhat better deal here overall, I think, which is nice. And again, in terms of structure and pacing it definitely does a very solid job of making it play out in a much tighter way without getting boring.

But for me personally, it didn’t quite have the glue that really stuck in my brain about the London strain of Chess – if I’d watched this version to begin with instead of the 2008 Chess in Concert, I probably would’ve shrugged and gone, “Eh, it was okay, didn’t do too much for me, soundtrack had some nice bits I guess,” and moved on, instead of writing thousands of words of thoughts and putting together a musical motif chart.

It’s fascinating to compare and contrast, though. I was already a nerd about revisions and adaptations of fiction, so a work with a bunch of different versions all with their own different takes and strengths is very much a thing that’s liable to nerdsnipe me.

Page last modified April 1 2025 at 00:33 UTC

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