Garry Kasparov’s 1997 chess match with IBM’s computer Deep Blue took place on a number of historical cusps. Not only did the contest itself symbolise a tipping point in man’s relationship with technology, but the event was one of the first to be widely watched via streamed coverage online.
    
Writer Matt Charman and director Josie Rourke’s engaging but not electrifying telling of the tale needs to straddle these worlds. It is slightly “Enronised”, so to speak: unlike Lucy Prebble’s account of corporate hubris it contains no big production numbers (although there are a few brief, ill-advised in-match balletic outbreaks), but rows of computers (and chessboards) run on tramlines to encircle the main playing area in the middle of an arena configuration in Manchester's Campfield Market Hall. Video projections are also used, partly just as tech shorthand but also for practical reasons of scale and sightlines. The match itself is intercut with flashbacks from the earlier lives of the principal parties: Kasparov (Hadley Fraser), Taiwanese-born Feng-Hsiung Hsu (Kenneth Lee) the principal designer of Deep Blue who was as driven as Kasparov, and Joel Benjamin (Brian Sills), the grandmaster who joined the IBM team as its gameplay consultant. Other players include Francesca Annis as Kasparov’s mother, his first chess teacher and constant possessive supervisor, and John Ramm in a clutch of roles (and wigs). Comedian Phil Nichol, who in recent years has developed an impressive sideline as an actor, plays a smiling broadcast anchorman.
    
Rourke’s programme note suggests that she sees this production as a kind of embassy to her native city from the Donmar Warehouse, where she is now artistic director and which acts as co-producer; the difference in scale notwithstanding, she takes a similar approach to her Donmar shows, finding a vibrancy to the storytelling without ever letting the exuberance off the leash to tussle with the substance of the play itself. Charman, however, does not tell the whole story. Not quite. At the end of the play we see Deep Blue being shipped off to the Smithsonian Institute. That is true of only part of its processing hardware; another rack went to work on reservations for United Airlines.
    
Round the corner in Peter Street, the long-closed Albert Hall, originally a Methodist chapel, reopens for a performance of Shelley’s poem The Masque Of Anarchy, a memorial and call to arms following the Peterloo Massacre in the city in 1819. At first Maxine Peake’s recitation, lit by hundreds of candles, seems atmospheric but little else; then in the middle section, its indictment of the marginalisation of the people begins to resonate with contemporary sensibilities and to sound with living breath.

Written for the Financial Times.