Bold Gambit by a Grand Master CHESS

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

When Trevor Nunn won a 1982 Tony Award as best director of a play for The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, then came back a year later to collect a Tony as best director of a musical for Cats, people wondered what he could do for an encore. After four years, during which Nunn was busy directing with the Royal Shakespeare Company, in London's West End, in opera and in film, the answer emerged: he could top himself on Broadway. Within four days he opened not one but two megamusicals. Starlight Express earned him yet another Tony nomination for directing; so did Les Miserables, for which he won a Tony.

To have three musicals among the 14 on Broadway is extraordinary. Last week Nunn became unique: he opened a fourth. Chess, which links a Soviet-U.S. summit, a world chess championship and a doomed international romance, has already racked up advance sales of $4 million. If it overcomes bumpy reviews -- which also beset Starlight and, to a lesser degree, Cats -- Nunn will parallel what he has achieved in London, where the same four shows have been running for years.

The Broadway version of Chess is daringly different from London's gaudy expressionistic phantasm. That show's chess matches are displayed on 128 video screens and refereed by a surreal punk; the production hopscotches from a Tyrolean resort to British boardrooms to Bangkok's red-light district, each cartoonishly evoked. Nunn took over in London, two weeks before rehearsals started, when the late Michael Bennett (A Chorus Line, Dreamgirls) was stricken with AIDS. Says Nunn: "By the time I came into the project, it was designed and cast, and the basic narrative decisions had been taken."

For Broadway, Nunn insisted on a completely new book and an equally new look. Central to his vision is a set made of towers painted to look like concrete and placed on turntables so they swivel to become a hotel lobby, an airport, a convention hall, a bedroom. To some extent these spaces resemble one another, but that is Nunn's point. Where the London Chess suggests the survival of kitschily various cultures, the Broadway version implies the triumph of a soulless international pragmatism that finds its perfect expression in interchangeable, neobrutalist architecture.

Nunn has wisely downplayed the London theme that the U.S. and the Soviet Union are morally -- or amorally -- equivalent. He focuses instead on three people who have paid a huge emotional price for success, only to realize that glory does not bring contentment: an American (Philip Casnoff) who has reached ! the world chess finals; his Soviet counterpart (David Carroll); and the American's adviser and erstwhile bedmate (Judy Kuhn), who falls in love with the Soviet. Theirs is not a charming Ninotchka-style romance: the CIA and the KGB hover on the periphery, exploiting the players and the game. Offsetting the gloom are a clear narrative drive, Nunn's trademark cinematic staging, three superb leading performances by actors willing to be complex and unlikable and one of the best rock scores ever produced in the theater. This is an angry, difficult, demanding and rewarding show, one that pushes the boundaries of the form.