There is a great sense of frivolity to this scene. Life catches up with you and you ridicule yourself. You have to allow yourself to go very high and very low. These are people who take their feelings and elevate them and manipulate them but finally the feelings catch up with them and take them to unexpected places. And then, allow the distractions to come in, the distractions of life, deal with what life brings you in the middle of all that’s going on inside. It’s as if Chekhov brings something almost Chaplinesque to this! It requires the emotional ability to drop one thing and pick up another and go any which way – but, underneath, your great need is still there. Break the parts of each scene up and rehearse them separately and you’ll find that.
— Director Nikos Psacharopoulos on a scene in Act III of The Cherry Orchard between Mme. Raneskayeva and Trofimov, quoted in The Actor’s Chekhov : Interviews with Nikos Psacharopoulos and the Company of the Williamstown Theatre Festival, on the Plays of Anton Chekhov
There’s a new film site on the web called Fandor: “a destination for film-lovers who want to look past the multiplex to a world of inspired, beautiful and surprising film.” I’ve been asked to contribute to the site on a monthly basis, and my first review is now up. It’s a subscription site, and all of the content is behind a firewall, although you can also access the pieces on a public Facebook page.
My first review is of Michael Cacoyannis’ 1999 film version of The Cherry Orchard, starring Charlotte Rampling as Lyubov and Alan Bates as her dissipated brother Gayev. An exquisite looking film, it also manages to capture some of the whimsy and farce in Chekhov’s original script.
I am excited to be writing for Fandor, and want to thank Kevin Lee for asking me to be a regular contributor.
You can click here to watch the film directly.
Thanks for that. Well done. I loves me some Chekhov because of the funny.
He’s rather dreadful when “the funny” is left out!!
Oh, and thanks, Doc. Fandor looks like it’s going to be a really exciting site. I’m pleased to be a part of it.
You’ve again sparked my interest in a film I haven’t seen. I don’t know the play either. I’m curious if you ever saw Vanya on 42nd Street and if so what you thought of it.
Phil – The Cherry Orchard is a beautiful play, maybe my favorite of Chekhov’s, although I love Uncle Vanya and The Three Sisters and The Sea Gull too. Marvelous plays. I did see Vanya on 42nd Street but it was years ago. I thought it was okay – I remember wanting to see more rehearsal, not just performance. If you’re going to do a play about the rehearsing of a Chekhov play, then I wanted to see more of that. But I do love all of those actors. And good old Phoebe Brand playing the dotty old aunt with her chickens – she was a member of The Group Theatre, married to Morris Carnovsky!
And it was really nice to see Brooke Smith get a nice juicy part as Sonya in Uncle Vanya. She obviously was “the girl at the bottom of the well” in Silence of the Lambs and is now on Grey’s Anatomy and has a wonderful career – but I’ve seen her in plays and in staged readings at the Actors Studio (most memorably an all-female version of 12 Angry Men) and she has so much more talent than is normally shown in the parts she gets. She is a kick-ass actress. She is perfect as the lovelorn plain Sonya.
Thanks for the tip on the site and the movie (which I inexplicably missed).
I’m so glad you singled out Brooke Smith about whom I know nothing apart from that film. I had rented it from Netflix because I had decided to see every film Julianne Moore had ever made, but it was Smith who was the one who really impressed me. I thought the rehearsal framing was just a gimmick (which I liked actually) and I assumed they had rehearsed before making the film. I liked it better than you did but it was my only exposure to the play so it’s hard for me to judge.
That reminded me of another film I rented because of an actor. I saw Panic in Needle Park because of Pacino. It lead of course to his getting the role in the Godfather. But the other lead Kitty Winn was just as good and her career never flourished. Go figure.
Phil – yeah, because it was the famous Andre Gregory “directing”, I would have loved it if they would have shown him actually direct, as opposed to just watch the scenes, fingering his string of beads. I would have loved to see him actually work with the actors.
But yes: Brooke Smith is so so good. Nice woman, too – been around forever, and is totally unforgettable in Silence of the Lambs, but she’s always good! Sonya is my favorite part in Uncle Vanya. That monologue she has about how much she loves the doctor – wow!!
And I believe that they had been working on the play, just for themselves as a side project, for some time. New York actors do such things, even famous ones, to keep their emotional/acting muscles in shape. So they decided to film where they were at in the process. If I recall correctly, Ruth Nelson (another actress from the Group Theatre) had been cast as the Aunt, and then she passed away – so they got Phoebe Brand in as a replacement. I liked it because they obviously had the comfort of working together for a long time, without any expectation of financial reward or anything …. It’s just that it’s a good play and they liked working on it. So that part of it I really liked.
Mitch – I’m excited about Fandor. If you subscribe, even for the free trial, you’ll see how much they have to offer. Online streaming of all of these great and sometimes obscure movies.
And the movie is very good – perhaps a bit too dark at times, but again, that is always the trap with Chekhov. There is that TERRIBLE moment when you can hear the first axe blow against the tree …. That’s how the play ends. It’s tragic. And yet: of course these people hadn’t paid their bills. What else did they think would happen? I think Chekhov saw them fondly, as ridiculous and impractical – not fools or idiots. But bills must be paid, and theirs weren’t, and they had warnings which they ignored, so they had to go. Perhaps a bitter comedy – but like I mentioned in my review: when I read the script as I would a book, I find myself laughing out loud. It’s a very “ba-dum-CHING” script, funny funny funny. An interesting combo. And why Chekhov is the greatest.
Thanks for the background information on the film, Sheila, that’s very interesting. I must get around to reading Chekhov’s plays one of these days. I have read some of his stories. Did you know that Tolstoy in his old age met Chekhov and they became friends? Tolstoy admired his stories but didn’t like his plays. But he didn’t like Shakespeare either. He told Chekhov once that his plays were even worse than Shakespeare’s, because at least in Shakespeare’s plays something happens! I get a kick out of that. I guess we all have our limitations.
hahahaha Chekhov’s short stories really are masterful. I did not know about that meeting with Tolstoy – too funny. I think Chekhov is very hard to do because “nothing happens”. Even in The Cherry Orchard – we have four acts of people drinking and standing around and hiding their feelings – the big event is the auction and that happens offstage. It’s not about its plot. But the worst possible thing is to only focus on “mood” with Chekhov, which is how so many productions go. If all you do is try to capture the “mood”, then you have self-indulgent nonsense. You have to get it ALL in there: the humor, the pathos, the social critique – the sense of people lying around doing NOTHING – with nowhere to go … but you also have to capture the hope that something will happen. Too many productions of Chekhov seem to assume that it’s a “done deal” that nothing will happen: the cherry orchard won’t be saved, and Sonya won’t fall in love, and etc. So what’s the point?
Michael Shurtleff, who wrote a famous book called Audition, and who was a casting director for many years (he “found” Barbra Streisand) – said something in his book about The Three Sisters, and the dangers of playing it badly. I paraphrase but it’s something like this: “The Three Sisters is not about three sisters who tragically never get to Moscow. The Three Sisters is about three sisters who do their damndest to get there.”
HUGE difference in the “playing” of it.