Reykjavik [Drama On 3]

By Juan Mayorga

An award-winning drama about chess, an art which, like life itself, is based on memory and imagination. A play about the Cold War. And the story of people who re-enact the lives of others.

Bail退n and Waterloo are united and separated by a chessboard. But it isn't chess they're playing, it's Reykjavik. They're playing at being Bobby Fischer, Boris Spassky, the German arbiter, the Icelandic bodyguard, Bobby's mother, Boris's second wife, the girlfriends Bobby never had, a hundred children bidding Boris farewell with their fists raised at Moscow airport, Henry Kissinger, the ghost of Stalin, the Supreme Soviet, the black knight threatening the white bishop, the missing fathers, the dead champions. It's not the first time they've done this, but it is the first time they've done it in front of someone else: a stray boy. And they've never done it with so much passion. Because today they're not just trying to understand what really happened at Reykjavik, what was really at stake. Today, Waterloo and Bail退n are looking for an heir.

Juan Mayorga is one of Spain's leading playwrights, member of the Royal Spanish Academy and winner of the 2022 Princess of Asturias Award for Literature, the Spanish National Theatre Award and the European Prize for Theatre.

Waterloo - Robert Emms

Bail退n - Gunnar Cauthery

Boy - Samantha Dakin

Russian voices - Oleg Tsiplakov and Ilia Golitsyn

Japanese voice - Nao Nakazawa

Other voices are played by the cast

Translated by Nicolas Jackson and Bill Murphy

Production by Sarah Tombling

Executive producer Sara Davies

Sound design by Jon Nicholls

Adapted for radio and directed by Nicolas Jackson

An Afonica production for BBC Radio 3

Award-winning drama from Spain. The Fischer-Spassky chess match is re-enacted in a park