Chess på svenska

This was the fourth version of Chess that I watched, after the 2008 Royal Albert Hall Chess in Concert, the 1990 Sydney production and the 1990 Long Beach production.

This one is just entirely different from the others. This is a Swedish translation of Chess from 2002, and I mean translation very loosely: half the songs here have just been repurposed to be about something entirely different and/or take place in some entirely different context within the plot, and the lyrics may or may not have any relation whatsoever to what the original lyrics were. (“I Know Him So Well” is just literally the exact opposite of the original song, with Svetlana arguing that Anatoly needs structure and rules, i.e. her, and Florence that he needs freedom, i.e. her.)

The bit where doing it in Swedish means they have to write new lyrics does give them a lot of creative freedom to restructure the story. An English version has to try to find some configuration of the existing songs and write its way between them, or else actually get Tim Rice to write entirely new lyrics. Chess på svenska knew the language change meant it didn’t technically have to do that, and it just really milked that for all it was worth in figuring out an entirely new way to tell something loosely like the base story using some of the same melodies (and some new ones).

This time around, Anatoly is the main-main character (he’s played by Tommy Körberg, who was Anatoly on the concept album, and I do like his performance a lot). We start with him at home, singing “The Story of Chess” to his son after an argument with Svetlana, who already thinks he’s cheating on her on his chess trips. There’s only one chess tournament once again, in Merano, with Freddie as the champion and Anatoly as the challenger.

I think this was the best beginning of Florence and Anatoly’s relationship in any of these. She really does vent her frustrations about Freddie to him (in a completely rewritten version of “Someone Else’s Story”, taking place after she witnesses Freddie with other girls at a club after “1956 – Budapest Is Rising”), and he’s interested in her father, and he sort of pulls her with him to go apply for political asylum when Molokov is distracted. All in all I quite liked much of the first act here, the way it also gave focus to Florence’s trauma and the way they connected and the generally effective staging, and was prepared to speak generally positively of it by the time of the act break.

On the other hand… where the London version’s first act was far too slow, this one really dragged in act two. We spend a while on the romance drama, and in act two it all gets a lot blander and lengthier.

We start Act II by doing “Argument” from the concept album, but as a totally rewritten argument between Florence and Freddie, which is fine. Then we do “Pity the Child”, which is one of the songs that’s just legitimately a translation, although it loses the whole parallel of the repeated “Just in case they said…”, boo. Then we do an argument between Anatoly and Svetlana at their hotel (Molokov had her and their son just plain abducted and taken there) after Anatoly cavorting with Florence has been publicized… and we use “Endgame” for it, and it’s partly a translation, has Svetlana berating him for only caring about himself and him telling her she never understood, etc. I was like huhhh, we’re pulling out the super-dramatic climax song now? Okay, I guess it gets a reprise for the climax? But okay, cool, fine.

Then Florence does “Heaven Help My Heart”, which is not really a translation but still fairly generic love song. Then Svetlana sings a new song, “He Is a Man, He Is a Child”, about her relationship with Anatoly. Then we do a “Merano” reprise where Florence and Anatoly go out to dance somewhere and Freddie arrives extremely drunk to warn him off her because she’s a terrible woman don’t you know women are the worst (can’t believe every version of this musical is wildly different from the others but even the Swedish version chooses to include Freddie’s misogyny verse, even though it has to move it to an entirely different spot in the plot in an entirely different song). Then we do a long sequence with some acrobats doing cool acrobatics while Florence and Anatoly gaze in each other’s eyes. Then they do “You and I”, as a generic love song. At this point I looked up at my husband and went, “So like, is the chess tournament still going on at this point?” Don’t get me wrong, the acrobats are great, it’s very artistic, but as far as the story goes we’ve just ground way to a halt by this point, in my opinion, and my attention was definitely wandering.

I think the problem is there isn’t a good enough sense of actual emotional progression to all this – of course dramatic arguments can totally be gripping storytelling, but here it kind of feels like you could put these bits in any order or skip some and they’d all make the same amount of sense – it doesn’t feel like anything actually changes for Florence and Anatoly because of Freddie showing up the way he does, or like Anatoly’s argument with Svetlana affected his emotional state or informed how he acts in the dance scene, or anything. As a result, it feels like it’s just kind of spinning its wheels here, doing scenes that are dramatic on their face but aren’t actually progressing anything for the narrative.

After this the Arbiter does announce they’re going to continue the chess match (what even is the Arbiter in this version, incidentally; he seems to be portrayed as some sort of half-supernatural being who can fly, for reasons I cannot fathom). After the rewritten “I Know Him So Well”, Anatoly meets Molokov and asks when he’ll get to meet his son, and Molokov tells him you’ve sure adopted the Western ideology of selfishness fast, and you know what’ll happen to your family if you stay in the West, and if you know what’s good for them you’ll lose the next match and then rescind your defection. (Oh, and Molokov gets a song here about the wife he used to have whom he betrayed as a sacrifice for the cause.)

Then they do the match, under the “Champions” chorus, and Anatoly just… quietly loses. No “Endgame” at all other than the one during that argument near the beginning of the act! I actually managed to miss the moment he even lost and had to rewatch it to be sure exactly how it went (it’s not even explicit whether he threw the match on purpose per se). It’s quite an anticlimax compared to the bombastic high drama of “Endgame”. I do get what they’re going for with this, though, the quietness and the ominous choir reciting the champions in the background just making it all very small and sad, and we don’t really need words here to know this Anatoly loves his son so much it was never a choice for him under Molokov’s explicit threat – after that Molokov scene, this is the most effective this ending could be, and I think they made a good call doing it this way, given they went for that.

I like Anatoly and Florence in this version, although I feel like they get muddled and less distinct in the second act. Freddie here is the boring asshole version, never really humanized beyond the obligatory “Pity the Child”, which isn’t enough by itself to make Freddie feel like a compelling character. I found myself particularly disappointed in Svetlana, though, because she does get a significant amount of focus but never in a way that really makes her sympathetic or likable or interesting; she’s just constantly being pitted against Florence and Anatoly rather than truly getting developed as a person with her own independent existence and feelings that aren’t about grr Anatoly and grr Florence. One of the things I liked about “I Know Him So Well” originally is that it’s about Florence and Svetlana, who are theoretically romantic rivals, each being sympathetic to the other’s point of view (even if they don’t know it) – originally Chess doesn’t pit them against one another at all, instead only having them echo and back up each other. Not so here, where Svetlana calls Florence a whore and “I Know Him So Well” is instead an argument where they’re both going, “No, he should be mine.” I just enjoy that dynamic a lot less, and Svetlana just feels kind of one-dimensional.

So, all in all, I think this version had cool promise and did some cool things, Tommy Körberg was great, but it also definitely floundered in various ways, particularly in the second act, in my opinion.

Page last modified April 1 2025 at 00:33 UTC

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