ABOUT THE CHERRY ORCHARD BY...

Charlotte Rampling
From the Evening Standard, February 11, 2000

I'd never studied Chekhov's book - I'd only seen the play a few times - but Michael Cacoyannis, who directs the film, had been working on this adaptation for years. The translation he made of "The Cherry Orchard "was used for a long time on stage.

When he asked me to come to Athens to talk about it, I did the worst read-through of my entire life and thought, "That's it." That night I went out to dinner. Strangely, I was on tremendous form and Michael saw me and that was it for him. Very soon I was trussed up in a corset as Madame Lyubov Ranyevskaya.

She's a deeply moving woman. She's fun, she's vulnerable, she's part of a world that no longer exists - the end of the 19th-century era - and the desire for new beginnings. Her brother Gayev is played by Alan Bates, who'd worked with Michael in "Zorba The Greek" in 1964. Michael is a fine actor's director and chose a brilliant cast that includes Katrin Cartlidge, Michael Gough and Frances De La Tour - who is outrageous as Charlotta, the German governess. Our "Cherry Orchard" was shot in Bulgaria, near Sofia, in the summer palace of the deposed king, which hadn't been inhabited for 70 or 80 years. The orchard was owned by farmers not far away. I believe the king's son is now welcome in Bulgaria and has bought back the house and the orchard as well.

Much later I arrived in Athens to start work on another film, "Signs And Wonders, "shot there for American director Jonathan Nossiter, and Michael was also there, giving the first showing of "The Cherry Orchard" to the Greek prime minister and Athenian intellectual society. There was absolutely no connection between the two films but I consider it my Greek Period.

Charlotte Rampling
From "I don't know what limits are; I never have",
The Times, February 3, 2000

"The vulnerability and unhingedness of the characters mean they have gone on a considerable journey already. And those journeys are what interest me because I can relate them to mine. Lyubov really lives each emotion to the full. She doesn't censor herself. That comes absolutely naturally to me. I love the way she's able to make a dance of her life - through comedy, through the absurd and through tragedy."

Alan Bates
From" Why Alan Bates refuses to",
The Evening Standard, February 18, 2000<br>
There is something moving and human in failure, Bates says. It is why we love the people in "The Cherry Orchard" so much. "They are terrific and they are hopeless, and just charming. And you can't believe the way they are behaving." We have to accept change, he says. Their tragedy is that they can't.

Alan Bates
From "At Home With Tragedy", by Nicci Gerrard,
The Observer, January 23, 2000

[the role of Uncle Gaev is a] " real sleeper: he's a hidden part; one of those dreams. I read the script and at first I thought: but everyone else is in charge and I'm just hanging round, on the edge. But actually he's so present; he becomes a major character. I loved working with Charlotte, who plays this divine woman whom everyone loves and no one can get hold of - and that's Charlotte too, that's what Charlotte is like herself. It often happens in Chekhov - he writes so wonderfully of families, and you become a family yourselves. You can't avoid what's written there."

Katrin Cartlidge
From "On the Edge"
The Times, February 5, 2000

"People have never seen me as anything other than a contemporary actress until now; it took a Greek director to do that," she says. "Apparently Cacoyannis saw me as Dodo in Breaking the Waves and said, 'That's my Varya.' He did see other people, but I told him I was born to play it so he laughed and said, 'You'd better have it, then.'"

[Having spent two-and-a-half months filming in 1998 in and around the deserted palace once used by the exiled Bulgarian royal familyŠ she was surrounded by] "an ominous fairytale atmosphere of amazing forests, tall grasses and poppies. We found ourselves living in three time-zones imposed on each other: the peasant culture that goes back to God knows when, the crumbling end of communism and the beginning of capitalism in the form of gangster culture. The head of some old king called Boris was buried in the grounds of the palace; we were probably the last civilians in there before the present king returned to make it his own again."

Michael Cacoyannis

Notes from the Director

Some years ago, driven by my deep admiration for Chekhov, I translated THE CHERRY ORCHARD, considered by many his greatest play, into English. It was an exciting and enriching journey into his profound, yet unpretentious and totally accessible, exploration of the human condition.

Having already transposed to the screen the plays of another great theatrical author, Euripides - "Electra", "The Trojan Women", "Iphigenia" - and freed them from the conventions of the stage, earning considerable critical acclaim, numerous prizes, Oscar nominations and world-wide distribution, I was tempted to adapt "The Cherry Orchard" for the cinema. I followed the same pattern of being faithful to the spirit of the original, while taking liberties by substituting images for words and opening up the action, whenever warranted by the plot and the playwright's own descriptions. The result is not "filmed theatre" but film derived from a literary from a literary source, just as novels ("Zorba the Greek", "Sweet Country") had provided me with material for the cinema.

What makes Chekhov's play such challenging material is its elevation of another period in time (turn of the century) into timeless actuality. The shifting sands of social transition, caused by the rise of new, primitive forces which supplant the decadent gentility of some previous generation, are known to all. And here they provide the canvas for a diverse collection of characters, of different ages and backgrounds, living in close proximity, yet morally, spiritually and psychologically so far apart, as to lend their attempts to communicate - politely, intensely or angrily - a tragicomic dimension.

The diversity and volatility of Chekhov's characters make for constantly changing tensions. Talking to each other, as they often do, at cross-purposes, they invariably arrive at a total impasse. As a result, the thoughts and feelings behind what is said, are more true than the words themselves. It is here that the cinema has an advantage over the theatre by its ability to focus on a character and delve into his or her soul.

A particularly striking feature of "The Cherry Orchard" is that it ignores the conventional boundaries that separate one generation from another. Two of the central characters - Lyubov and her brother Gaev - although well into their middle age, in many ways think and act like children. They are trusting, generous and ill-equipped for the harsher realities of life. When they don't daydream they play games and their tears are soon washed away by laughter. It's left to those of hardier peasant stock and the ardent young intellectuals to take over and build a different future on the ruins of a disintegrating and nostalgic past.

The large country estate where the main action takes place, with the sprawling, dilapidated family house and its lush, wooded grounds, dominated by the cherry orchard - dazzlingly white as the film opens - is the perfect setting, both aesthetically and dramatically, for the lingering sadness that marks the end of an era and the threatening clouds of a stormy new one.