Our Editor-in-Chief, Richard Beck, meets up with the multi award-winning stand-up Vadd Ilich ahead of his show, Vladislav, Baby Don't Hurt Me, at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
My chess club closed because the war started, and rooks and bishops were replaced by tanks and helicopters.
Vlad, you became obsessed with chess at a very early age. How did that come about? Did it run in the family?
I was watching the world chess championship of 99’. Not intentionally, it was either that or Soviet cartoons… and chess is more suitable for children.
I fell in love with the game almost instantly and asked my dad to play that same day. It ran in the family. From both my mum's and dad's side, everyone was in on it, and everyone wanted to outsmart the rest. My grandmas were the most difficult to play against, because if you win, you don't eat that day.
I don’t meet many Macedonians; in fact you might be the first. Can you describe your country and explain something of the tense geopolitical situation in which you grew up, because I understand that affected your development as a chess player.
North Macedonia is a beautiful, tiny little country, rich in history, with delicious unique cuisine, dramatic mountainous landscapes and pearlescent lakes. Also, it’s very cheap! I would describe Macedonians as warm, kind and a bit too loud.
The geopolitics surrounding my country when I was a child is a complex issue. We'd need three hours and a bottle of vodka. I’d highly recommend watching the Oscar nominated film Before the Rain directed by our very own Milcho Manchevski and starring Rade Serbedzija (Gregorovitch in Harry Potter & Deathly Hallows Pt.1). It perfectly encapsulates that period.
As for my lived experience, it was a strange period. My chess club closed because the war started, and rooks and bishops were replaced by tanks and helicopters. NATO was there and they were calling the shots, and it felt like being a pawn in someone else’s game. I remember asking my dad what NATO meant and he told me it was are a large debate club. I asked, “How do you mean?” He said, “Well, N-A-T-O … No Action, Talk Only".
Eventually you got out of there and you became an immigrant about which you have many observations in the show, but can you give us a flavour here?
My first week in the UK, and I've just moved in a new flat. I come from a very open culture, and it's considered polite to invite the neighbours in for a coffee. The first one I met, I invited in and the next morning I saw him putting up a small fence. A fence! I said, "Too late mate, I'm already in."
Then there was a dramatic love break-up and your father’s ill health brought about another turn of events.
The biggest commonality between chess and life is it's all about making decisions. You must take those challenges head on, reassess and improve. A bit like a chess game. where you see the winning position, but the opponent comes up with a queen sacrifice out of nowhere and now you're stuck thinking, "What's the next move?" It's important to stop and think but not pause for too long.
In my case, my queen ran away with the bishop and before the next match I had to take care of my dad. But then the game of chess came into its own again. Up until that point, chess was about winning. Gary Kasparov, one of the greatest of all time said, "It's not enough to play, you have to win".
But when chess reappeared into my life, it was in a different image, and I rediscovered it as a more holistic and nurturing process in the matches I played with my dad while he was in hospital. It strengthened an unspoken bond between us and for that reason alone, I will always see chess as nothing less than poetry.
Circumstances then allowed you to take up comedy, which you’ve been doing for six years now, in three languages, though not at the same time, I assume, although you could.
For a while I did pop back and forth between doing shows in English here and going home and doing them in my native tongue. At the peak of that period, I performed a show to a mixed crowd of three different nationalities in London and it's great to just translate the same joke three times. A standard club set is 20 minutes, so I only needed seven jokes! Eddie Izzard was my inspiration behind that, you'd see her popping into Helsinki to perform in Finnish, two months later she’s in Belgrade, speaking fluent Serbian.
I eventually ended up doing sets in Italian as well, at the Zelig theatre in Milan, however my Italian is quite poor. I've also tried Romanian and failed.
But otherwise you’ve been successful. You won first place at the King of the Gong show at the Comedy Store and received the One to Watch award at the Up the Creek club amongst others.
Yes, those were hard fought battles. At the King of the Gong, three members of the audience receive a red card prop that they can hold up if they don’t like your set. If the crowd boos you, cards go up and you’re done.
It was my third gig ever, and I was on very last. The man before me got on stage and said: “Hi, I’m Dave and I’m single.” and got booed off immediately. I got on and thought I was doing well, when suddenly this noise, like that of an air dryer from the toilets began disrupting my set. Turns out, I was getting booed too.
I came back six months later to win it, but it just goes to show how tense and challenging these competitions can be.
And chess remains a hobby that you enjoy at your local club in Prestwick, I hear.
Chess has been a career, a hobby, a career again, then a hobby one more time. I'm a little older now, and I would like to harness what I've learned and start chess tutoring. Not for any financial gains (even though, as we know, the stock market lads are knee deep in chess bonds), but for the pure passion I have for the game. How I will do it, I don't know.
Comedy shows keep me up until very late at night and chess lessons start early. I might be taking the plunge here, but a combination of the two seems to be the best way forward, so I wrote this show.
