There are a number of well-worn clichés and stereotypes about Sweden, all of which have at least some foundation in fact – as the land of IKEA, clean lines and clean streets, Volvo and ABBA. As a non-driver I have no strong views on Volvo, but I am strongly in favour of everything else on the list and grew up with the music of ABBA, who won the Eurovision song contest for Sweden back in 1974. It is all too apparent that their homeland remains as devoted as ever to Agnetha and Anni-Frid, Björn and Benny, both collectively and singly.

Kristina från Duvemåla, the ambitious musical theatre piece written by ABBA’s Björn and Benny and premiered in 1995, was seen by over a million people during its initial four-year run in Sweden, at the Gothenburg Opera and the Malmö Opera and Music Theatre as well the Cirkus in Stockholm. With its folksy book, its lush orchestrations and its powerful melodies (and despite its occasional longueurs) many regard it as Sweden’s national opera. Although an English translation exists and has been presented at Carnegie Hall and the Royal Albert Hall, the piece has struggled to win a staging outside Scandinavia. Not so the other notable stage work by Andersson and Ulvaeus, Chess, which was originally written with a book and lyrics in English by Tim Rice. Chess has enjoyed revival after revival and it has also spawned hit records such as 'One Night in Bangkok', 'I Know Him So Well' and 'Heaven Help My Heart'.

Nonetheless, the difficulties inherent in making sense of the story, avoiding embarrassing anachronisms and overcoming basic logistical challenges have, for almost 30 years now, bedevilled the work. It has enjoyed a parallel existence to that of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide, which has never quite shaken off the burden of Lillian Hellman’s original book, laden as it was with political allusions. It has usually relied to a dangerous extent upon the patience, politics and downright indulgence of the audience, but the tunes, oh the tunes!

In brief, Chess plays out personal dramas against the backdrop of the paranoia-inducing Chess World Championships of the 1970s, which regularly used to see Soviet grandmasters pitted either against American counterparts or, even more potently perhaps, against fellow countrymen who had defected to the West. It is certainly an operatic idea, combining grand themes with intensely personal dilemmas and decisions with global consequences.

The original orchestrations by Anders Eljas were for full symphony orchestra and it was the London Symphony Orchestra that both made the original cast recording and first presented the piece in concert back in the mid-1980s. Unfortunately for all involved, the timing of the piece could hardly have been worse. Even while the piece was in development, that era of the Cold War was coming to an end, as Mikhail Gorbachev prepared his programmes of Glasnost and Perestroika and optimism broke out about the end of the Iron Curtain and peaceful coexistence in Europe. What had seemed potent and excitingly contemporary, suddenly looked potentially tired and anachronistic. Chess did enjoy moderate success on the London stage, but even substantial rewriting and the addition of perhaps the loveliest song in the entire piece, 'Someone Else’s Story', could not make the work appeal to audiences in New York, where it flopped. Even on the bien pensant liberal East Coast of the USA, it cannot have helped that the principal American character in the work is an arrogant and foul-mouthed, sexually deviant sociopath. In blue states as well as red, all-American heroes are still the best box office.

I have just returned from attending the final performance in a formidable six-month, sell-out run of Chess at the Gothenburg Opera. Chess på Svenska is yet another reworking of the piece (not entirely to the benefit of the narrative) and the large-scale presentation was entirely in keeping with the venue. The opera house orchestra (around 40-strong, enhanced by two excellent electric guitarists and a drum kit) was in fine form and I and my delightful Swedish host Margareta relished sitting stage left in the front row of the stalls, immediately above an excellent brass section, with a commanding view of the entire pit. The one down-side was that not only the first-rate band, but also the garish, arrogantly inappropriate and irrelevant production, served to remind us we were in an opera house: for sure, no commercial theatre anywhere in the world could afford to indulge its creative team in a presentation so hideous and so tenuously related to the material being performed. Once again, a composition was being treated not as a work in its own right, to be thoughtfully and creatively explored in order that light should be shone upon its inner recesses, to enlighten or uplift the audience. It was being used principally as an excuse for a brash and self-indulgent production.

This was a shame, because the principals, mainly from musical theatre backgrounds and all miked, were excellent and the conductor was one other than that great doyen Anders Eljas, who originally orchestrated the piece 30 years ago. Yes, it was grand and operatic and most (though not all) of the great tunes were there, but the flaws of the piece were all too obvious. Not only was it still not clear why the Russian player, who defects at the end of Act One with a passionate declaration of love, tamely returns to his oppressors at the end of the piece; in fact, with such an impersonal and overblown production, I can’t imagine anyone much cared. This was all about the music, which certainly soared and inspired. By no means for the first time in my life, I explored the merits of either closing my eyes in the opera house, or else focusing entirely upon the action in the pit rather than the travesty on the stage.

There could not have been a greater contrast with a production I had attended just a few nights earlier in what, for me and a secret army of others, is one of the truly great venues in London or indeed, anywhere – the Union Theatre in Southwark. The Union specialises in musical theatre and operetta, and its Gilbert and Sullivan series during the past few years (including two major transfers to Wilton’s Music Hall) has been a notable triumph. This tiny, 50-seat venue is under a railway bridge, but the occasional rumbling of a train serves only to make it all the more atmospheric. Sepulchral and cramped it may be, but I cannot get enough of the place. A very different production of Chess ran there during February and March, all played out on a square that cannot measure much more than 10 feet by 10 feet.

Under the ever-watchful gaze of the Theatre’s inspirational founder, Sasha Regan, the ‘Chess Returns’ team brought a hybrid version of the piece to light, restoring as much of the music as possible, supported by an excellent chamber ensemble, concealed behind a curtain. Doubling and quadrupling up, the cast never flagged and all the principals, singing without amplification in that vault, were first rate. I have rarely seen so many five-star reviews, nor five-star reviews that were more richly deserved. Relative paucity of resources did not hamper their efforts, as a spell-binding and entirely believable political love story played out, feet away, before our eyes. It would have been invidious to single out any one of the leading lights, but several of them – leading man Nadim Naaman (note-perfect in his acting as well as his singing), glamorous and dignified Sarah Galbraith, Tim Oxbrow (who convincingly played out an on-stage nervous breakdown every single night) and Gillian Kirkpatrick (stunning as a Rosa Klebb-like KGB minder) – deserve a bigger stage than this.

Was it, however, opera? I would argue that, insofar as it matters, yes it was. Despite its tricky book, Chess can and does ring true when it is played this way, convincing beyond any doubt that there is genuine depth and pathos to the piece, and lasting value. There is an observation, variously attributed but almost certainly uttered at least once by Lenny Bernstein, to the effect that the only distinction that really matters is not between genres, but between music that is good and music that is not. The same is true of productions and performances. The Gothenburg Opera may have revealed the full grandeur of Chess, but the production at the Union Theatre transcended any shortcomings in the original dramaturgy of the piece and took us straight to its heart. Let us hope we can see and hear more not only of this flawed masterpiece of the musical theatre, but also of this dazzling, pocket-sized production.