Reviews | “The Cherry Orchard”

Mr. Karathanos chose to read the “Cherry Orchard” with the eyes of his soul, and his honest intentions emerged in the show, which the actors seemed to really enjoy, being part of a nightmarish scenery that did not resemble Chekhovian Russia. […] Referring, albeit implicitly, to the current sociopolitical affairs, he headed steadily toward decline and death, yet causing cracks of promising light.

Bookpress.gr, 25 April 2015

What Karathanos does now is not some sort of velvet revolution, a highbrow avant-garde pretence, risk-free innovation. It takes guts, madness, nerve, it surely takes arrogance and it also takes a great effort from the environment that nurtured the artist. While most people would pant for a new Cherry Orchard, Karathanos hunts for a new Chekhov. Yet Chekhov is here. Probably different to the one we know, unrecognizable and unfamiliar, strange and far from his usual style, yet still here.

Efimerida ton Syntakton, 27 April 2015

Nikos Karathanos became the host of a sad feast. His characters, genuinely Chekhovian, ceded to identify their existence with a space, a cherry orchard; refusing to see it under a new light, merely because they were afraid to see themselves in a new era.

tospirto.net, 27 April 2015

Yes, his “Cherry Orchard” had much more hidden aspects than his previous productions. In this performance, Karathanos incorporated many more of his signature elements. Yet this 21st-century “Cherry Orchard” was a uniquely made show, with rousing details and breathtaking performances. A show that could be presented as it is in stages all over the world, since it is an outstanding and sound dramaturgic suggestion.

Kathimerini, 28 April 2015

The most unconventional yet insightful staging of Chekhov we have seen. Nikos Karathanos’ direction boldly breaks with the “Chekhovian” form, keeping the meanings of the play intact. He urges his characters to act on the edge of their metaphysical and earthly dimension.

Monopoli.gr, 6 May 2015

Nikos Karathanos, instigating “inconsolable performances”, intensifies the tragicomic backdrop and founds his aesthetic/stylistic line on the quadriptych: vernacularism, poeticism, eccentricity and transcendence. Being an iconoclast more than ever, he frantically addresses affect and highlights anti-heroic thrill rather than the Chekhovian rhetoric or characters. Thus, he disengages the “Cherry Orchard” from the tradition of psychological and/or social realism and launches it to the universe of illusions and dreams, the irrational and the absurd.

Athinorama, 7 May 2015