{"id":28439,"date":"2010-10-12T16:39:55","date_gmt":"2010-10-12T20:39:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=28439"},"modified":"2026-04-13T21:16:09","modified_gmt":"2026-04-14T01:16:09","slug":"all-russia-is-our-orchard-the-earth-is-so-wide-so-beautiful-so-full-of-wonderful-places","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=28439","title":{"rendered":"“All Russia is our orchard. The earth is so wide, so beautiful, so full of wonderful places.” – The Cherry Orchard<\/i>, Anton Chekhov"},"content":{"rendered":"

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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.<\/p>\n

— Director Nikos Psacharopoulos on a scene in Act III of <\/i>The Cherry Orchard between Mme. Raneskayeva and Trofimov<\/i>, quoted in The Actor’s Chekhov : Interviews with Nikos Psacharopoulos and the Company of the Williamstown Theatre Festival, on the Plays of Anton Chekhov<\/a>\"\"<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There’s a new film site on the web called Fandor<\/a>: “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. <\/p>\n

My first review is of Michael Cacoyannis’ 1999 film version of The Cherry Orchard<\/i><\/a>, 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. <\/p>\n

Go check out my review here.<\/a><\/p>\n

I am excited to be writing for Fandor, and want to thank Kevin Lee for asking me to be a regular contributor. <\/p>\n

You can click here to watch the film directly.<\/p>\n

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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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[194,330,1708],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28439"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28439"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28439\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":104311,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28439\/revisions\/104311"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}