Cherry Orchard Links Cacoyannis Interview New York Reviews Film Links  Bates Film & Television Checklist Bates 101 Internet Movie Database (IMDb) British Film Institute (BFI) Not On BATES ARCHIVE News In Memoriam SPOTLIGHTS Knighthood American Film Theatre Fifties TV Al Hirschfeld FEATURES Biography Timeline Photo Gallery Actors Centre Piffle Ephemera ARCHIVE Theatre Film Television Audio Interviews Writing     Alan Bates: You have to guard against indulgence, It's got to do with behaving, being. You've got to feel absolutely one with your part. You have to try not to perform, but to be.

f i l m The Cherry Orchard North American DVD release 25 February 03 IF YOU HAVE LOVED "The Cherry Orchard" on stage, as I have, you will be immediately entranced by the way Michael Cacoyannis has opened up the play for a different medium. From the first moment, the situation is made fresh for us, because he has added Ranevskaya's "back story": her life in Paris. Charlotte Rampling, moreover, is brilliant casting for the aristocrat who is by turns beguiling, childish, tragic, foolish. Her beauty and fragility has been tested by a hard life: she has learned to sacrifice for love, and she has lived the life of an exile, but she remains generous - or is it irresponsible? - to a fault. As the credits roll, Ranevskaya returns to the home and family she left five years previously, and finds that all is on the brink of change, yet for the moment, unchanged. Serfs sleep in the yard, her brother Leonid (Alan Bates) in late middle age still dressed by his servant and preoccupied by an obsession with billiards and the endless intriguing situations it presents him. On stage, this ripe moment of beauty about to be lost, is evoked mainly by words. In the film, we are invited to divide our sympathies between past and future, as the life of this family is torn by change. We fall in love ourselves with the great orchard, with the rundown but elegant house, for a gentle way of life that includes a large staff of servants. We see that for the brother and sister, giving up this life is unimaginable: something MUST intervene; but only Lopakhin, once a peasant, now wealthy, extends a solution: and he is rejected. Cut up the land for holiday villas? Chop down the cherry orchard? Impossible! Furthermore, we know something that the dramatis personae of "The Cherry Orchard" do not: their personal struggles are about to be supplanted by a greater one, represented in the film by the menacing lurker whose anger grows even as he receives charity; and by the mysterious sound, or pulse, or vibration, that everyone suddenly feels: what is it? Something shifting in a mine? In the air? We know: it is fate, the revolution. This foreknowledge gives us another perspective: the choice is only temporarily theirs. Soon matters will be out of their hands; no happy ending is possible, even for Lopakhin, the new owner of the estate. Cacoyannis has pondered these matters for years, and the results show: the "Cherry Orchard" characters are treated with affection and respect by the director, and given life by Rampling and Bates and the rest of the cast. The affection of the brother and sister is touching. Just as we know that Ranevskaya has seen something of the world, we know that her brother Leonid has not: he is still a boy, though his beard is white. Bates captures the charm and sadness of this character to the full. He is not in charge, at home, though he is the senior member of the family there. He makes one great effort to sort things out, and for a moment there is the possibility of salvation via a rich relative: he places his maximum bid boldly at the auction, but the final bid is four times as much. His defeat is painful, and we are crushed along with him. Yet, in the aftermath, having lost everything, he is resilient, childishly optimistic. It's a relief to have it over with, life as a banker will be an adventure. Lopakhin's victory, expressed in one unacceptable but irrepressible burst, is an anticlimax. He has done all he can to help the aristocrats, to no avail, yet when he does exactly what he has recommended to them, they turn away from him. Instead of being the deus ex machina come to save them, he is seen as the destroyer from within, and his inability to ask for the hand of Varya (who loves him) is the final irony. The film ends as the play does, beautifully realized by Cacoyannis and Michael Gough, as Firs, the old retainer who long ago rejected emancipation. Throughout, the music of Tchaikovsky is used to great effect. The costumes and set decoration are superb, and as other reviews have said, the orchard itself is glorious. American audiences must hope that this film will find a North American distributor, or turn up on cable. I have no patience for critics who say that Chekhov is impossible to film, or that his characters no longer are relevant to audiences, or that nothing happens in the plays. I am confident that Chekhov's work will always find receptive eyes and ears, and survive what Shakespeare has always survived: adaptations, odd interpretations, innovative or downright wierd productions: Shakespeare is Shakespeare; and Chekhov remains Chekhov. Karen Rappaport, London, 1 March 00 From The Daily Mail, 11 February 2000 A FEW years ago, everyone seemed to be making film adaptations of Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya." So it makes a change to see another of his great plays, "The Cherry Orchard," given the same treatment. Veteran director Michael Cacoyannis -- his big hit was "Zorba The Greek," in 1964 -- has made it as a labour of love, and it's a film that's full of elegance and sophistication. Set at the start of the 20th century, it shows a family of impoverished Russian aristocrats adjusting, or failing to adjust, to the imminent loss of their country estate. The two members of the family who ought to be its leaders -- a middle-aged brother (Alan Bates) and sister (Charlotte Rampling) -- are more concerned with throwing one last ball and reminiscing than facing up to the future. So the household is run by Rampling's foster-daughter (Katrina Cartlidge). She has a crush on an upwardly-mobile neighbour (Owen Teale) whose father used to be a peasant on the family estate. There is a romantic sub-plot, with Rampling's pretty teenage daughter (Tushka Bergen) falling for the young man (Andrew Howard) who used to tutor her dead brother. The look is painterly, and shows painstaking study of art at the turn of the century. The picture is beautifully lit, and a fine cast is given every chance to explore the depths of the characters... As source material for the cinema, Chekhov's play has some glaring weaknesses. Nothing much happens, and the little that does is downbeat and predictable. Moreover, the relevance of the play to the turn of the 20th century is limited. The problems of a feckless aristocracy are not exactly headline news, and modern audiences may find it hard to watch these characters without an impatient feeling that they have brought their problems upon themselves. From Variety, September 27 - October 3, 1999 Reviewed by Derek Elley at the World Film Festival, Montreal, September 6, 1999. ...In the most imaginative moment of his adaptation, Cacoyannis invents a 10-minute pre-credits sequence, set in 1900 Paris, showing Anya (Tushka Bergen) arriving to bring her mother, the ethereal and slightly dotty Lyubov (Charlotte Rampling), back to their debt-ridden family estate outside Moscow. By opening this way, the picture loses the atmospheric opening of the original, in which Lyubov & Co arrive home in the middle of the night, but does show something of the attractions of la vie Parisienne that Lyubov left beyind. ...Alan Bates, as Lyubov's lackadaisical brother, Gaev, manages his lines with ease and looks right in his role, drifting in and out of scenes to gve the movie, briefly, some class. ... Tackling this most difficult of playwrights to bring off onscreen, Cacoyannis manages some occasionally striking moments, such as the family shaken by a ghostly sound during their afternoon stroll, and in its final reels the film achieves a typically Chekhovian dying fall. ... Production design and costuming are excellent, with a real period look. Running time: 141 minutes. Comments by Charlotte Rampling From the Evening Standard 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. 18.ii.00 Bates interview in the Evening Standard which touches on "The Cherry Orchard" as well as "Antony and Cleopatra." From an Evening Standard review by Jasper Rees: Nothing, give or take the odd gun shot, ever happens in Chekhov. Characters come, characters go, a certain amount of hair is torn out, some trees are chopped down (off-stage). But mostly the human tide of vanity and despair ebbs and flows undisturbed by anything so vulgar as events. David Hare's summary of "The Cherry Orchard" is as follows: "Act One: we're going to sell the cherry orchard. Act Two: we're really going to sell the cherry orchard. Act Three: we're selling the cherry orchard. Act Four: we've sold the cherry orchard." ... From an Evening Standard review by Alexander Walker: ... The actual cherry orchard is so breathtakingly, blindingly beautiful that it steals all the sympathies you should be reserving for its owners. I was quite upset to see the axe fall and looked for an end-credit assurance that "No tree was harmed during the making of this film". In vain, I'm afraid. ... From a Times review: There are two surprises in Michael Cacoyannis's epic version of Chekhov's "The Cherry Orchard." The first is how faithfully it shadows the themes and rhythms of the play. The second is Charlotte Rampling. If an entire film could be excavated from a single face, it is Rampling's desperate aristocrat, Lyubov Andreyevna. She has rarely delivered a more exquisite performance. ... A July 2000 Jerusalem Post interview with Michael Cacoyannis: Besides returning Cacoyannis to the focus of media attention "The Cherry Orchard" also marked the resumption of the director's long-standing professional relationship with Alan Bates, one of the stars of "Zorba The Greek." "We've been friends for many years and meet regularly," says Cacoyannis. "We are more than just collaborators." ...

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