Julian Orchard ? : A Festival response to The Orchard (2013)

This is a Festival response to The Orchard (2013) in Microcinema with James Mackay

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6 October (updated 7 October)

This is a Festival response to The Orchard (2013) in Microcinema -

with James Mackay, at Cambridge Film Festival

Putting forward the work of prized pupils as if representative of a class or school, or taking the best figures to make claims for the achievements of the Tories in power (if not just inventing them instead, to make so-called welfare reform seem effective, even it is starving people into jobs), this is what is almost always nowadays called cherry-picking. (Cranes with a cradle and mounted on small vehicles are even called cherry-pickers, for no obvious reason.)

In The Orchard (2013), title and film alike, there is an attempt to distract attention from where the power in the latter comes from, by leaving out the word 'cherry'. Yes, we are meant to believe that the title derives from a real orchard in which a group of six amateur players (three men, three women) will perform an improvised version of Chekhov's play - even that is pretty vague, as if the instructions or invitation on which they are acting have been put through Waiting for Godot first.

However, it is hard to work out whether they are, in their factions, more heartily sick of each other than we become of the lot of them. Afterwards, we were told that all of the actors is performing a script, just a script where there is a good deal of bickering, largely disputation as to who will play which part and whether it has previously (in the film) been agreed - we were told in the Q&A that each, before and during shooting over just one weekend, was supported individually in playing a wholly unimprovised part by the directors, Clive Myer and Lynda Myer-Bennett.

That is as it may be, but none of it makes their carrying on engaging or with a plausible outcome, not even having them dine in costume. They have the excuse that they, the characters, are not professionals, but they want to treat what they have been asked to do as something to work towards, yet at the same time starting, on their opening evening, from such an open viewpoint, where female parts might be played by men and how to double is the least of their worries, that no one can reasonably believe that they will achieve anything, dressing as their characters or no.

The contrast is then with when they actually start looking at the text (which, previously, they have made almost a virtue of not having to hand), and we get cherries in the form of various translations of Chekhov. If, as we were told afterwards, The Cherry Orchard has outperformed any other play that we can think of, in numbers of times put on, it is small wonder that the touchstones of Chekhov's play will enliven the film, but they do not make believable that this factional troupe has somehow transformed itself and become inspired by, or just familiar, with their parts.

True, in the cacophony of their discussion and disputation when they have arrived (whose sound quality, maybe deliberately, was not very good, but such as to hurt one's mind with babble), we have every impression that they know the play and its characters. Yet, as noted, they refuse to go anywhere near the printed copies until the Chekhov is alive on their lips and in their acting. Maybe I blinked, but I do not know how that was meant to be credible.

In the overly long first part of the Q&A, before it was thrown open to the audience, we were told that Chekhov considered the play a tragedy. When I got to ask I question, I pointed out that it had been stressed to my class when we first studied it that he had called it a comedy (the Oxford University Press edition, we had been told, drew attention to this fact)*, but, rather than being comic, was it not toxic, because the same inertia that had stopped the family acting seemed to have infected the cast.

I was told that the directors interpret the play as being about 'change' - the change comes in because Lopahkin, who has had no one listen to him, buys the orchard to chop down for holiday homes. If that is 'change', it seems quite a regressive one to modern ears, even if, as in Uncle Vanya, there is much rhetoric about what the future will bring and be like...


* Postlude

I do not have OUP text, but I looked out my Penguin Classics text (Harmondsworth, 1959), translated and introduced by Elisaveta Fen, and she says that he wrote to Olga Knipper (an actress from the Art Theatre, whom he married) The next play I write for the Art Theatre will definitely be funny, very funny - at least in intention. Fen goes on to write (p. 28) : 

The play was altered and re-copied several times, but there was one point on which Chekhov remained consistent - it was 'not a drama but a comedy : in places almost a farce'.


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)