Chess The Musical star Edward Laurenson on singing, chess and Chess

Edward Laurenson. Photo / Dean Purcell

Greg Bruce meets Chess The Musical star Edward Laurenson

We met over a chess board in the living room of a beautiful modern home in Parnell. The fire was on and an extremely large cat was stretched out in front of it, asleep. Rising operatic star Edward Laurenson walked in wearing a tux, looking like a movie star, specifically the movie star Robert Pattinson, who is most famous for playing the hot, pasty vampire Edward from the Twilight films. I had known about this resemblance in advance, because when the publicist first got in touch about this story, she had attached a picture of Laurenson and another of Pattinson and the only reason I could tell them apart was because Pattinson's featured a GQ logo. In real life, the resemblance was, if anything, even more striking.

Laurenson, 33, told me there had been a point in his life, around the peak of Twilight mania, when five or six people a day were approaching him because of the resemblance. He was once denied service in a bar because they believed his ID, featuring the name Edward, was a fake. These looks presumably did not hurt his chances during casting for the upcoming New Zealand production of Chess, in which he was chosen to play the Russian, Anatoly, alongside former New Zealand Idol runner-up Michael Murphy.

Having been around the world with his singing career, Laurenson is back home to star in Chess The Musical. Photo / Dean Purcell

The primary reason for our meeting was to talk about his role in the show and the reason for the chess board was because the publicist for the show had told me Laurenson was a chess champion with, she believed, an international ranking. I believed, wrongly as it turned out, that it would be interesting to incorporate a game of chess into this story about Chess. Not only had I never played chess, but I wasn't even sure of the correct name for the horses. I had never had much facility for games of strategy and we only had an hour. Nevertheless, we tried. He set up the pieces in a late game position from a famous match involving an American grandmaster who I'd never heard of - not Bobby Fischer or the woman from The Queen's Gambit. When he'd finished setting up, I asked which of us was in the stronger position. He told me he was.

When I mentioned to Laurenson the publicist's claims about his chess prowess, he looked shocked and afraid and told me he wasn't a very good chess player and certainly didn't have an international ranking. What he had was a rating, from playing chess online, of about 1600. Accounts of the quality of a 1600 player on chess forums vary wildly, largely depending on the arrogance of the commenter, but seem to congeal mostly around "not bad for a club player".

We made a few moves, or more specifically he made some moves and then suggested some moves for me. At one stage I tried to take his queen but he wouldn't let me because he said I could only take diagonally. He explained the rules as we went. If a pawn makes it to the other side of the board, he told me, it can become any piece it wants. "That's why people love chess," he said. "It's sort of life on a board." When asked how this lesson related to life, he said, "Hard work gets results."

Looking thoughtful, but not because he's feeling challenged by his opponent. Photo / Dean Purcell

From an early age, he wanted to be Freddie Mercury and to achieve that, he started working on his singing. He took classical singing lessons and soon was entering and winning competitions. A big breakthrough came when he won the Guildhall Prize from the IFAC Handa Australian Singing Competition in 2013, which gave him a scholarship that took him to London to study for a master's degree, despite the fact he didn't even have an undergraduate degree. He studied with Australian soprano Yvonne Kenny and received regular coaching from Dame Kiri Te Kanawa. He has now travelled the world performing, including at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where he performed the role of Tarquinius in Benjamin Britten's The Rape of Lucretia, and Older Thompson in Tom Cipullo's Glory Denied, bringing him reviews like this from the San Francisco Classical Voice: "... blessed with the ability to look both handsome and unstoppably mean while singing with unflinching power."

He says the highlight of his career was performing for the Queen, who was just a metre or two away from him as he sang What a Wonderful World at London's Goodenough College, where he was studying and living, and she was the patron.

He started playing chess at intermediate school where, despite his spectacular good looks, he was, he says, a nerd. The chess club was also linked, in a way he didn't make entirely clear, to the gardening club. He said: "I think it was a sanctuary for us not necessarily rugby players to go to."

I asked how the game of chess has helped with his singing career and he said, "It's really helped with my singing career because it got me a role here in New Zealand with G and T productions."

At about this point, the cat, having left the comfort of its place in front of the fire, jumped up on my lap and from there climbed up on to the board. I heard a piece fall, but the cat was enormous and in my way, so I couldn't see what the piece was.
As it moved off the board, I saw my king lying on its side. "The cat just resigned," Laurenson said.

"Oh well," I said, "You win some, you lose some," even though this was the only time I'd ever played.

Chess The Musical, Kiri Te Kanawa Theatre, Aotea Centre, June 16-19.