As noted beneath the reviews from the daily and Sunday Times critics, one praised the show, especially the book, while the other panned the same material.

In September 1988, a news event occurred which caused the above ad to run and Tim Rice to write the following column in The Daily Telegraph:


A Romance That Is Music to the Ears
By Tim Rice

Rarely has my heart gone out so quickly and completely to a stranger as it has this week to Elena Ahkmilovskaya, one of the world's top female chess players and until very recently a key member of the Soviet women's team. She has just eloped in the middle of the Chess Olympiad taking place in Thessaloniki with the captain of the United States men's team, John Donaldson.

I wish this courageous lady every happiness with her new life in the West. She did not even wait to finish the tournament before starting it, and has even left behind her young daughter from a previous marriage.

The reason for my enthusiasm is not just that I am a romantic soul, but that this fine pair has at last vindicated the central hypothesis of my musical play Chess, in which a Soviet player defects to the West in the middle of a tournament, primarily because of love for a member of the American delegation.

It has been galling for me to read week after week for two years in the Sunday Times theatre listings that the show has a "trite and improbable story". Only a few days ago a critic in the Independent trashed the show as being "sadly behind the times" when it is now clear my mistake was in being nearly three years ahead of them. Why couldn't this love affair have happened three months ago, when we were dying a death on Broadway?

I hate to gloat (actually, that's not true, I love to), but it would take a writer made of nobler stuff than I to resist a quiet chuckle in the circumstances. The incident does, however, raise one or two interesting points about East/West relations, in particular in the context of the world of chess...

Here, at last, is a story that shows chess players to be normal human beings; not all of them are Bobby Fischer-type hermits giving every indication of being at least two pawns short of a set except when playing. And it is salutary to be reminded that despite the heady fumes of glasnost--which many in the West, particularly in the media, have inhaled with understandable glee--leaving Russia is still not just a matter of booking a flight through your local travel agent: the Soviet chess delegation at Thessaloniki is a huge 28 strong, including a KGB presence whose heavies masquerade as chess officials.

In other words, the murky, often comical, intrigue that we have attempted to portray in Chess still continues, despite lovable Mr. Gorbachev and the naïve beliefs of some Western journalists. Also: love can still conquer all, even when gold medals are at stake.

So there are lessons in this for East/West watchers; but also a vital one for writers of the books and lyrics of musicals. How can these poor writers, operating in a field in which every character behaves in a way that would invite certification if practised in real life, singing nonstop and suffering from regular outbreaks of manic choreography, convince observers that their story is plausible?

The obvious solution is to make the plot so outrageous, so devoid of inteligible characterisation or realistic storyline, that the ridiculousness of it all sneaks past the critics unnoticed. I am grateful to the newly wed Mr and Mrs Donaldson for enabling me to see this theatrical truth through the human truth of their marvellous story.